so much of my life is consumed by not letting myself get depressed

i often wonder what life feels like for folks that dont have that issue going on

lately i see myself as being in a very distinct phase of my life. material comfort, job people respect (right or wrong), but day to day life can be lonely and sometimes boring. compared to how much i used to have to write about, these days i can pass weeks without making note of them passing really

not that im not still growing and learning, gosh, i sure am — but i guess i feel less creative?

i used to have a feeling of “oh i wonder what i will do with life, wonder what i will accomplish, wonder what adventures i will have” and i dont really feel that anymore

maybe that is just depressive thinking coming through though? that’s the thing, can never just trust oneself to feel things

i think most people don’t feel excited or unexcited about their future, they just live more in the present. i need to work on that. idk, how do you experience life?

Last year in January I made some predictions for 2014 and gave my calibration level for each. Time to see how I did. Ones in black were successes, ones in red were failures.

1. Obamacare will survive the year mostly intact: 80%
2. US does not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 90%
3. Syria’s civil war will not end this year (unstable cease-fire doesn’t count as “end”): 60%
4. Bitcoin will end the year higher than $1000: 70%
5. US official unemployment rate will be 6. Republicans will keep the House in US midterm elections: 80%
7. Democrats will keep the Senate in US midterm elections: 60%
8. North Korea’s government will survive the year without large civil war/revolt: 80%
9. Iraq’s government will survive the year without large civil war/revolt: 60%
10. China’s government will survive the year without large civil war/revolt: 99%
11. US government will survive the year without large civil war/revolt: 99%
12. Egypt’s government will survive the year without large civil war/revolt: 60%
13. Israel-Palestine negotiations remain blocked, no obvious plan for Palestinian independence: 99%
14. Israel does not get in a large-scale war (ie >100 Israeli deaths) with any Arab state: 95%
15. Sochi Olympics will not be obvious disaster (ie spectacular violence, protests that utterly overshadow events, or have to be stopped early): 90%
16. Putin will remain President of Russia at end of 2014: 95%
17. Obama will remain President of USA at end of 2014: 95%
18. No nuclear weapon used in anger in 2014: 99%
19. No terrorist attack in USA killing > 100 people: 90%
20. No mass shooting in USA killing > 10 people: 50%
21. Republic of Shireroth will not officially disband or obviously die before end of 2014: 90%
22. Republic of Shireroth will remain in Bastion Union: 80%
23. Active population of Shireroth on last 2014 census will be between 10 and 20: 70%
24. Slate Star Codex will remain active until end of 2014: 70%
25. Slate Star Codex will get more hits in 2014 than in 2013: 60%
26. At least one 2014 Slate Star Codex post will get > 10,000 hits total: 80%
27. No 2014 Slate Star Codex post will get > 100,000 hits total: 90%
28. 2014 Less Wrong Survey will show higher population than 2013 Survey conditional on similar methodology: 80%
29. 2014 Less Wrong Survey will show population 30. 2014 Less Wrong Survey will have > % female than 2013 Less Wrong Survey: 70%
31. 2014 Less Wrong Survey will have 32. HPMoR will conclude in 2014: 80%
33. At least 1 LW post > 100 karma in 2014: 50%
34. No LW post > 100 karma by me: 80%
35. CFAR will continue operating in end of 2014: 90%
36. MIRI will continue operating in end of 2014: 99%
37. MetaMed will continue operating in end of 2014: 80%
38. None of Eliezer, Luke, Anna, or Julia will quit their respective organizations: 60%
39. No one in LW community will become world-famous (let’s say >= Peter Thiel) for anything they accomplish this year: 80%
40. MIRI will not announce it is actively working on coding a Friendly AI (not just a few bits and pieces thereof) before the end of 2014: 99%
41. I will remain at my same job through the end of 2014: 95%
42. I will get a score at >95th percentile for my year on PRITE: 70%
43. I will be involved in at least one published/accepted-to-publish research paper by the end of 2014: 20%
44. I will not break up with any of my current girlfriends through the end of 2014: 50%
45. I will not get any new girlfriends in 2014: 50%
46. I will not be engaged by the end of 2014: 80%
47. I will be living with Ozy by the end of 2014: 80%
48. I will take nootropics on average at least once/week through the second half of 2014: 50%
49. I will not manage to meditate at least 100 days in 2014: 80%
50. I will attend NYC Solstice ritual: 60%
51. I will arrange some kind of Michigan Solstice Ritual: 50%
52. I will not publicly identify as religious (> atheist) by the end of 2014: 95%
53. I will not publicly identify as neoreactionary or conservative (> liberal or libertarian) by the end of 2014: 70%
54. I will not publicly identify as leftist or communist (> liberal or libertarian) by the end of 2014: 80%
55. I will get a Tumblr in 2014: 50%
56. I will not delete/abandon either my Facebook or Twitter accounts: 60%
57. I will have less than 1000 Twitter followers by the end of 2014: 60%
58. When Eliezer sends me a copy of “Perfect Health Diet”, I will not be convinced that it is more correct or useful than the best mainstream nutrition advice (eg Stephen Guyenet’s blog): 70%
59. I will end up being underconfident on these predictions: 50%

Of predictions at the 50% level, 4/8 (50%) were correct
Of predictions at the 60% level, 7/9 (77%) were correct
Of predictions at the 70% level, 6/8 (75%) were correct
Of predictions at the 80% level, 12/15 (80%) were correct
Of predictions at the 90% level, 7-0 (100%) were correct
Of predictions at the 95% level, 5-0 (100%) were correct
Of predictions at the 99% level, 6-0 (100%) were correct

I declare myself to be impressively well-calibrated. You should all trust me about everything.

2015 predictions coming soon.

me as a 17 year old liberal: gay agenda?! that's absurd! you think gays are actually plotting to destroy your way of life?

me now: *is gay and plotting to destroy your way of life*

In 100 C.E., Nicomachus of Gerasa observed that

1³ + 2³ + 3³ + … + n³ = (1 + 2 + 3 + … + n)²

Or “the sum of the cubes of 1 to n is the same as the square of their sum.” The diagram above demonstrates this neatly: Counting the individual squares shows that

1 × 1² + 2 × 2² + 3 × 3² + 4 × 4² + 5 × 5² + 6 × 6²
= 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³
= (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6)²

“While working on Big Fish, I got very Method: I’d stare at a mirror until I could get myself crying, and then I would start writing. It was literally days of just staring at a mirror and crying, but it works–something about that process captures the right feeling. And by getting myself to the point of crying, it helped me get other people to that point. I had done it before with another project, a horror movie, so the process for that was to get myself terrified and then write. A lot of writers will play music while they’re writing, or they’ll have a scent that reminds them of the movie’s world and smelling gets them back into it. Anything’s fair game as long as it works.”

— John August (FilmCraft | Screenwriting, P. 43)

Amazing video from @TheAlexanderBOK – demonstrating again, how the NYPD needs accountability: https://t.co/rYLSgqpSiX // watch to the end

— Bill Fitzgerald (@funnymonkey) December 31, 2014

The New York Post reports that “NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety”:

[O]verall arrests [are] down 66 percent for the week starting Dec. 22 compared with the same period in 2013, stats show. Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame. Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300. Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241.

The Post obtained the numbers hours after revealing that cops were turning a blind eye to some minor crimes and making arrests only “when they have to” since the execution-style shootings of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

Scott Shackford snarks:

Well, we can only hope the NYPD unions and de Blasio settle their differences soon so that the police can go back to arresting people for reasons other than “when they have to.”

The NYPD’s failure to arrest and cite people will also end up costing the city huge amounts of money that it won’t be able to seize from its citizens, which is likely the real point. That’s the “punishment” for the de Blasio administration for not supporting them. One has to wonder if they even understand, or care, that their “work stoppage” is giving police state critics exactly what they want—less harsh enforcement of the city’s laws.

No doubt police are hoping that citizens will be furious when police don’t do anything about the hobo pissing on the wall in the alley or won’t make the guy in apartment 3b turn down the racket at four in the morning. And they’re probably right to a certain degree. But if they think the city is going to turn into sheer anarchy over the failure to enforce petty regulations, they’re probably going to be disappointed.

Update from a reader:

Nice to see the NYPD are not responding like petty, petulant, spoiled children and have instead taken up a constructive debate over their grievances with the mayor. It would be sad to think that they were so thin skinned as to compromise the integrity of their positions because their soft, touchy-feely side was bruised when the mayor expressed how he cautioned his child in dealing with the police.

Another piles one:

It’s anecdotal, but we went away for Christmas and left the car on the street. At $45, one street-cleaning ticket is cheaper by far than putting it in a garage. Then I changed my return, putting us in line for two tickets. I got back yesterday anticipating a $90 bill—and found nothing on the windshield. Suspecting the wind might have blown the tickets away, I checked online. Zip.

I’m selfishly pleased by that. But if this horseshit “wartime footing” stance by the NYPD union extends even to traffic cops, then the life-and-limb ramifications of minimal law enforcement are appalling. The NYPD is using New York citizens – its bosses, its responsibility, and the folks who pays its salaries – as the ante in its poker match with the mayor. In the past, I’d have expected the citizenry to pretty quickly side with the cops, be it simply out of self-interest. But I think this time the NYPD may have made a bad bet. One of their men killed a man and walked. Then, when even gently criticized, they took the city hostage rather than eat a bite of crow, or even swallow a bite of pride. This time may be different, and I very much hope it will be.

tiredcommunist:

kropotkindersurprise:

2010 - The Red and Black Café, a radical worker-owned collective in Portland, Oregon, kicked out police officer Jim Crooker who was drinking coffee there. The clientele of the café includes locals, homeless people, activists and immigrants. Because of their ‘safer space’ policy, designed to create a safe environment for their customers, the Red and Black Café does not serve police. [video]

( By the way, the Red and Black Café could use your help! Check out their donation page )

honestly i’m just sitting here cackling

jfc what a chucklehead

Mo' Testaments, Mo' Problems

G. K. Chesterton’s 1910 collection What’s Wrong With The World surprisingly does not open with “this is going to take more than one book.”

In fact, he is quite to-the-point about exactly what he thinks the problem is:

Now, to reiterate my title, this is what is wrong. This is the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul…it is the huge heresy of Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost our way we must lose our map also.

Examples are clearly needed, but before we continue, a digression.

Chesterton is a brilliant writer and a genius in understanding the human soul. Sometimes these are good things – in Chesterton’s case, it’s a big part of what makes his fiction so amazing. Other times they aren’t. There’s a famous failure mode where some brilliant scientist who is a genius at understanding particle physics sees a social problem, pulls a few equations out of his tool kit, and declares the issue solved.

In the same way, I worry that Chesterton pulls a few emotions and brilliant turns of phrase out of his tool kit and thinks he’s solved everything. And the difference between brilliant physicists and brilliant students of human experience is that physicists are less likely to convince anyone else.

The trademark style of What Is Wrong With The World is to take some common-sense proclamation, like “feminism is about fighting for women” and come up with some incredibly clever reason why exactly the opposite is true:

By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.

Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us…We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. The solemnity of politics; the necessity of votes; the necessity of Huggins; the necessity of Buggins; all these flow in a pellucid stream from the lips of all the suffragette speakers. I suppose in every fight, however old, one has a vague aspiration to conquer; but we never wanted to conquer women so completely as this.

Do you follow? Men have from time immemorial been pushing the importance of male pursuits like politics and public life; women have been equally pushing the importance of family, virtue, and the private household. Feminists are then a group of women who have given up, admitted men have always been right about everything and all female pursuits are a waste of time; now women are desperately pleading that men allow them to join in their superior ways.

Therefore, Chesterton opposes feminism not because he is against women being equal to men, but precisely because he wants to keep women equal to men. The entire book is like this – paragraph after paragraph of verbal judo in which you end up opposing conservativism because you want things to stay the same, or supporting rebellion to protect the integrity of the state, or whatever other crazy inverted idea Chesterton has turned his brilliant but twisted mind to.

"ATTENTION HUMANS – IT IS NOT BECAUSE YOU ARE INFERIOR THAT YOU WILL BE ERADICATED – BUT PRECISELY BECAUSE YOU ARE SUPERIOR" -GK Chestertron

— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) February 4, 2012

At its best, this is a form of narrative reversal that helps break through our preconceptions and see things in a different light. At its worst, I worry Chesterton has actually lost, through atrophy, the ability to think in a straight line. Like, there must be at least one thing which is approximately the way it appears, and I’m not convinced Chesterton will be able to notice it. Ask him whether we should drown puppies, and he will come up with an extremely convincing argument that we should drown puppies precisely because we abhor cruelty to animals.

"Arf arf arf! Not because arf arf! But exactly because arf NOT arf!" GK Chesterton's dog

— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) December 8, 2011

II.

To very briefly sum up the main argument of What’s Wrong:

1910s Britain has a lot of social problems, many of them caused by the Industrial Revolution steamrolling over human values. Conservatives demand that we keep things exactly as they are, social problems and all. Progressives correctly point out that the new industrial economy conflicts with human values, but “solve” the problem by demanding we destroy whatever human values are left in people to make them better cogs in the industrial machine. For example, women traditionally value having a home of their own and getting to spend time raising children, but this is inconsistent with women working full time in factories – therefore, socialists and feminists demand we put people in communal housing, have children raised communally, and promote women taking on the male gender role – so that all barriers to women doing factory work full-time are removed. Possibly the Conservatives and Progressives are secretly in cahoots – the Conservatives protect the interests of the upper class directly, and the Progressives remake the lower class into a form compatible with serving the system that the upper class run, all upon “humanitarian” grounds.

Chesterton, on the other hand, believes that we should promote human values against the Industrial Revolution and the upper classes who intend to benefit from it. The values he wants seem to be of the “everyone lives in their own nice cottage with a nice garden and a nice picket fence and the men have stable fulfilling jobs and the women stay home and raise children” type. This will require undoing a lot of “progress”, and admitting that the medievals were better than us in a lot of ways, but it’s better than continuing to slide toward doom. It will also involve redistributing property so that everybody has enough money to make this vision a reality. Chesterton has a perfectly marvelous solution for how to do this, which unfortunately this book is too small to contain. But he did warn us by calling the book What Is Wrong With The World and not What Is Wrong With The World And How I Propose To Fix It, so it’s okay.

III.

I wasn’t too sure what to make of all this. The political landscape of the 1910s when the book was published is recognizable, but only barely. In particular, although I can’t tell if Chesterton’s claims fairly described the Left of his own time, they don’t seem to describe the Left of ours. Chesterton’s Left was obsessed with industrial order and optimization, hoping to replace a society ruled by traditions with one ruled by nearly fanatical efficiency and conformity. The modern Left seems to have switched tactics entirely, and insofar as it can be accused of falling too far to one side of the chaos-order dichotomy I think both its friends and enemies would admit it is squarely allied with Chaos, and with a fertility of difference and distinction that borders on the cancerous. As the book was at least in part a polemic against a position that no longer seems to exist, one that barely even seems to have any cladistic descendents, I’m not really sure what to make of it.

There were a lot of digressions into individual issues, some convincing, others less so. But there were two parts I consider central to the whole idea, and which I want to go into at more length:

My point is that the world did not tire of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

This is one of those times when writing in 1910 makes things too easy. If Chesterton had been writing in 1990, he might have thought to ask – has Communism been tried and found wanting? Or has it been found difficult and left untried?

And with our modern hindsight, he might decide there’s not so big a difference as he thinks. Like, Chesterton is defining “Everyone was super-obsessed with Christianity all the time for hundreds of years” as “Christianity was left untried”. The definition only works if by “try Christianity” he means “everyone lives exactly according to the Christian ideal.” But “make everyone live exactly according to the Christian ideal” is not a primitive action.

At the very least, the medievals tried to try Christianity. They reserved political power for Christians, gave immense wealth and clout to the clergy, gave religion a monopoly on education, required everyone to go to church, and persecuted atheism and heresy. If, as per Chesterton’s definition, this didn’t result in people trying Christianity, then that means that trying to try Christianity has failed. If an idea is impossible to implement, that is a strike against the idea. Unless Chesterton has a better idea for how to implement Christianity than the way the medievals tried, his argument is wrong and it is perfectly legitimate to say that the failure of the Christian project during the Middle Ages doesn’t bode well for it today.

And I understand that making a medieval-level effort to retry Christianity isn’t exactly in the Overton Window, but this ties into the other passage of Chesterton’s I want to talk about:

A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course, all little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice.

Yet it could be done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thing is the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man (that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to a cabman’s daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter of fact apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister’s daughter. I will not ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not.

But what is the excuse they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use, for thus cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argument would be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor people than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced (against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes) to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of public instruction; and because in one out of the forty children there may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after the children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the workingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting (literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on his head, the workingman must allow his little girl’s hair, first to be neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly, to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl’s hair. But he does not count.

First of all, either the misuse of the word “literally” is more ancient than I had supposed, or else the customs of the 1910s class system are indeed weird and wonderful. But putting that aside…

I am clearly one of the people whom Chesterton is talking to. I have yet to prescribe any particular remedy for lice, but that is because lice aren’t so much of a problem today, or if they are they don’t make it to a psychiatrist. But I have given antidepressants.

And this seems a lot like Chesterton’s lice. Once again, people are crowded together into squalor, oppressed by landlords and schoolmasters, and so some of them – usually the poor – become depressed. Antidepressants are moderately effective against this problem, although they have physical side effects in some people and are considered embarrassing by many more. To take an antidepressant is a sacrifice in much the same way that cutting your hair is a sacrifice. Its only possible justification is that it does treat depression, just as haircuts do treat lice.

So I can imagine Chesterton coming at me, fire in his eyes, demanding “Why are you solving this problem by giving pills?! You should be solving this by improving society so that poor people don’t end up depressed!”

And all I could answer is “If I wrote a prescription for ‘improve society’, I’m not sure the pharmacist would know how to fill it.”

Like, I want society to be improved. And I try. I give money to charity. I vote. I try to argue persuasively for good political positions. But when I’m done doing all of that, it turns out there are still depressed people left over. At that point, if I take the “high road” and say “no, I’m not going to give you an antidepressant, society should be giving you a job and better housing and more opportunities for social interaction,” then it doesn’t shame society into doing that. It just means that my patient will get more and more depressed and maybe commit suicide.

And I can imagine a 1910s doctor in my same position, who’s done what he can to help the poor, but in the meantime, he’s treating this girl, and if he doesn’t tell her to get a haircut it’s not going to make her life better, it’s just going to mean she gets lice. Which are creepy and gross and probably not very fun to have at all.

So Chesterton says “Whatever, I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to society!”

But society isn’t listening! Chesterton may be the most brilliant essayist of all time, here’s this classic book he wrote which is still justly famous over a hundred years later, and people didn’t even listen to him. They’re sure not going to listen to me.

Even if the intellectual battle were to be completely won – even if nobody objects to helping the poor on the grounds of “there’s not enough money”, or the grounds of “it would disincentivize them to work”, or the grounds of opportunity costs, or whatever – actually getting society to do something would still be just as difficult as getting it to do all the other things we all agree it should, like end corporate welfare or have less police brutality.

This is why I am so worried that Chesterton calls Christianity “left untried”. He seems to hear “This idea would work if we could get people to do it, which we obviously can’t” and answer “So you’re saying it would work! Great! Everyone who wants anything other than this idea is wrong and should stop!”

The problems Chesterton writes about are clearly the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. He doesn’t say so in so many words, but I think he considers “rolling back the Industrial Revolution” to be a perfectly reasonable solution:

There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it, but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best way out of our troubles.

If every single person in the world wanted to roll back the Industrial Revolution, and we all had perfect coordination power and followed absolutely every command of a task force appointed for that problem – then yes, we could do it. But if even one person objects, then that person is going to start manufacturing things cheaper than the rest of us. If one country objects, that country is going to manufacture tanks and cannons and stealth bombers and the rest of us are going to have knights on horseback with which to fight them off.

The arrow of time is not nearly as bidirectional as Chesterton seems to think. The reason that the medievals could maintain deindustrialization without any effort is that nobody knew how to be industrialized even if they wanted to, and nobody wanted to because nobody knew there was such a thing as “industrialization” to want. Any modern attempt to recreate medieval society is doomed to be different than medieval society, because it will involve either industrialization, or an extremely concerted and tyrannical worldwide effort to suppress industrialization – both of which the medievals lacked.

The socialists, feminists, and other groups whom Chesterton dislikes seem to understand this. They say things like “Well, we’re never getting rid of industrialization and the pressure it puts on people to live in dingy slums. So let’s at least institute communal housing which will be a little more liveable and affordable than the other kind.” It might work or it might not, but it’s the sort of thing you can imagine coexisting with modern society. Chesterton’s argument is “No, let’s roll everything back until everyone can have a nice cottage in the Cotswolds.” It’s a very desirable solution, but it’s addressed to a hypothetical universal monarch who has the power to implement solutions against incentive gradients with no defectors ever. This is a book whose target audience is nowhere to be found, and those physicians who were cutting children’s hair to protect them from lice could justly have replied “Dammit, Gilbert, I’m a doctor, not a God-Emperor!”

There’s obviously a line of intellectual descent from Chesterton to the neoreactionaries of today. And yet the latter group seem less naive in an important way. They know that their proposals are impossible within the sphere of normal politics, so they’ve mostly stopped the “arguing for their proposals” part of the plan and started crafting alternative ways to have human societies in which apparently impossible coordination problems can get solved. Meanwhile, poor Chesterton never seems to get beyond wanting his utopian vision to become a party platform.

And I’m not sure he can. I get a weird vibe out of everything he’s written, like his brain lacks the gear that goes back and questions whether what it’s saying actually makes sense. I mean, no one does a great job having this gear, but in him it just seems completely missing, as if he is so feverishly brilliant that to try to analyze the truth-value of what he’s written or look for another side would break the spell.

But I can’t complain. It gives me paragraphs like this:

Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

This is exactly the project, but it’s probably going to have to wait for after the Singularity.

(see also: Gutenberg)

I made a mistake in my story the other day about the CIA’s murder of Gul Rahman at the Salt Pit black site in Afghanistan—the same mistake that just about every other media outlet made in covering the story. Several people brought it to my attention, including data journalist Caspar Egas, who dissected the case at Medium.

In short, I wrote that Rahman, who froze to death while shackled to a wall, was one of 26 cases of “mistaken identity,”as described in Footnote 32 of the Senate torture report. But it turns out the CIA detained at least two people named Gul Rahman, the one I wrote about, in 2002, and the second in 2004.

The second Gul Rahman—the person referred to in Footnote 32—survived his ordeal. He was held in solitary confinement for a month even after the CIA realized it had picked up the wrong person, and the agency kindly gave him a “nominal payment” upon his release. He was picked up because he had the same name as another (i.e. third) Gul Rahman, who was “believed to be targeting U.S. military forces in Afghanistan” and who apparently was never captured.

As Egas wrote, this conjures “up an image of haphazard dragnets sweeping up the Afghan equivalents of ‘John Smith’.”

So it seems that Gul Rahman, whom the CIA murdered in 2002, was not a case of mistaken identity; he was a “suspected militant.” You can read about his capture in this Associated Press story here, as recounted by his friend who was detained along with him and who was tortured at the Salt Pit as well.

Rahman “was taken during an operation against…an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and allied with al-Qaida,” the AP said. Hekmatyar, who was notoriously violent (even by the standards of Afghan warlords), received hundreds of millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1980s, when he was fighting Soviet forces.

It’s a complicated affair but whether Rahman was “guilty” or not, he certainly shouldn’t have been tortured to death by the CIA.

 

 

The post Correction: There were Three Gul Rahman’s (and Maybe More) appeared first on The Intercept.

[source: sowhatfaith.com]

Patheos’ Science On Religion points out that liberal Protestantism is dying even as more conservative Protestant movements thrive. This seems counterintuitive in the context of society as a whole becoming less religious and conservative. So what’s going on?

In the early 1990s, a political economist named Laurence Iannaccone claimed that seemingly arbitrary demands and restrictions, like going without electricity (the Amish) or abstaining from caffeine (Mormons), can actually make a group stronger. He was trying to explain religious affiliation from a rational-choice perspective: in a marketplace of religious options, why would some people choose religions that make serious demands on their members, when more easygoing, low-investment churches were – literally – right around the corner? Weren’t the warmer and fuzzier churches destined to win out in fair, free-market competition?

According to Iannaccone, no. He claimed that churches that demanded real sacrifice of their members were automatically stronger, since they had built-in tools to eliminate people with weaker commitments. Think about it: if your church says that you have to tithe 10% of your income, arrive on time each Sunday without fail, and agree to believe seemingly crazy things, you’re only going to stick around if you’re really sure you want to. Those who aren’t totally committed will sneak out the back door before the collection plate even gets passed around.

And when a community only retains the most committed followers, it has a much stronger core than a community with laxer membership requirements. Members receive more valuable benefits, in the form of social support and community, than members of other communities, because the social fabric is composed of people who have demonstrated that they’re totally committed to being there. This muscular social fabric, in turn, attracts more members, who are drawn to the benefits of a strong community – leading to growth for groups with strict membership requirements.

The evolutionary anthropologist William Irons calls demanding rituals and onerous requirements “hard-to-fake symbols of commitment.” If you’re not really committed to the group, you won’t be very enthusiastic about fasting, abstaining from coffee, tithing ten percent, or following through on any of the other many costly requirements that conservative religious communities demand. The result? Only the most committed believers stick around, benefiting from one another’s in-group-oriented generosity, social support, and community.

Since then, Sosis has also demonstrated that religious Israeli kibbutz members are more generous in resource-sharing games than both secular, urban Israelis and secular kibbutzim. He argues that this is, in part, because demanding rituals – such as having to pray three times a day and study Torah many hours a week – serve as a signal of investment in the kibbutz community. The more rituals you participate in, the more invested you feel – and the more willing you are to sacrifice for your fellows.

But if your community doesn’t have any of these costly requirements, then you don’t feel that you have to be really committed in order to belong. The whole group ends up with a weakened, and less committed, membership. Liberal Protestant churches, which have famously lax requirements about praxis, belief, and personal investment, therefore often end up having a lot of half-committed believers in their pews. The parishioners sitting next to them can sense that the social fabric of their church isn’t particularly robust, which deters them from investing further in the collective. It’s a feedback loop. The whole community becomes weaker…and weaker…and weaker.

Even though I’ve quoted like half the blog post, it’s worth looking at just to see the empirical and statistical arguments for their hypothesis.

Not that any of this should come as a surprise. This is the same principle of maintaining separation between in-group and out-group members which has worked so well for so many eons. But making the in-group follow specific rules to prove their dedication does seem particularly effective.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of atheist religion-substitutes. I went to the Secular Solstice last weekend, and it was held in the New York Society For Ethical Culture building. As usual I avoided social interaction by beelining to the nearest reading material, and in this case that was a plaque detailing the group’s history. The Society for Ethical Culture was founded in 1877 by an ex-rabbi (of course it was an ex-rabbi) and looks pretty much exactly like every atheist religious substitute today. That got me a little depressed. Atheism has been trying the same things for the past one hundred fifty years and, I would argue, largely failing for the past one hundred fifty years. Religion substitutes are hard.

The biggest atheist religion-substitute I know of is Sunday Assembly. I recently came across their “Ten Commandments”:

1. Is a 100 per cent celebration of life. We are born from nothing and go to nothing. Let’s enjoy it together.

2. Has no doctrine. We have no set texts so we can make use of wisdom from all sources.

3. Has no deity. We don’t do supernatural but we also won’t tell you you’re wrong if you do.

4. Is radically inclusive. Everyone is welcome, regardless of their beliefs – this is a place of love that is open and accepting.

5. Is free to attend, not-for-profit and volunteer-run. We ask for donations to cover our costs and support our community work.

6. Has a community mission. Through our Action Heroes (you!) we will be a force for good.

7. Is independent. We do not accept sponsorship or promote outside organisations.

8. Is here to stay. With your involvement, the Sunday Assembly will make the world a better place.

9. We won’t tell you how to live, but will try to help you do it as well as you can.

10. And remember point 1…The Sunday Assembly is a celebration of the one life we know we have.

But it’s tough for me to picture these on big stone tablets. And yeah, I know the reason we don’t have the original tablets is that when Sunday Assembly Moses came down from Mt. Sinai he saw the Sunday Assembly people only celebrating life 95 percent, and waxed wroth, and broke the tablets, and then ordered the Levites to slaughter all the men, women, and children who had participated in this abomination. And then…

…okay, that’s probably not the reason they’re not on tablets. But that’s just the thing. It’s impossible to imagine these commandments inspiring strong emotions in anybody. It’s impossible to imagine people sinning against them in a meaningful way. Most of them aren’t even commandments. They’re more like promises not to command. If you absolutely must compare this pablum to a list of ten points, the proper analogy is less to the Ten Commandments than to the Bill of Rights.

(“God shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”)

Atheist religion-substitutes seem unconcerned about or actively hostile to placing rules upon their members. I mean, there are a lot of things that are like “You must be tolerant”. But in practice everybody thinks “intolerant” means “more intolerant than I am, since I am only intolerant of things that are actually bad,” so no one changes their behavior. People say that we have advanced by replacing useless rules like “don’t eat pork” with useful rules like “be tolerant”, but rules against eating pork resulted in decreased pork consumption whereas it’s not clear that rules like “be tolerant” result in anything.

The only secular-ish group I have ever seen which is truly virtuous in this respect is, once again, Giving What We Can. They demand that members give ten percent of their income to charity. To join you must request and sign a paper copy of a form pledging to do this. Every year, the organization asks you to confirm that you are still complying. I don’t know what happens if you aren’t, but I assume it’s too horrible to contemplate. Maybe Peter Singer breaks into your house and kills you for the greater good.

But the point is, here’s an organization that has a very specific rule and demands you follow it. And even though their pledge form looked kind of like a tax return, signing that form was more of a sanctifying and humbling experience than any of the religion-substitutes that try to intentionally generate sanctification. Not because I was at some chapel where someone gave a rousing sermon overusing the word “community”, but because I was binding myself, voluntarily submitting to a higher moral authority.

Someone on my blog a while back used the word “nomic” to refer to a subculture based on following a rule set, sort of like an opt-in religion without beliefs or supernatural elements. I looked to see if it was a real thing but couldn’t find any references other than the card game. But I find the idea interesting. If it contains mechanisms for treating subculture members differently than non-members, it seems like an optional add-on module to government, and a strong candidate for the sort of thing that could develop into a healthy Archipelago.

theguilteaparty:

reindeerplaydate:

forfuturereferenceonly:

kowka:

haraii:

christmas eve what about christmas adam

happy christmas adam to all men’s rights activists

Please stop pestering us with things like this. This has nothing to do with men fighting for their rights. Eve is short for ‘evening’. Please don’t turn activism into a joke. Thanks.

Someone isn’t having a good christmas adam

Christmas Adam: December 23rd. Comes before Christmas Eve and is generally unsatisfying.

The perfectionist in me is going to go nuts posting this a day late, but it’s just too perfect to pass up.

Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when conversation about game design was first bubbling up out of our community of insecure practitioners, a few polarizing topics would arise again and again. You’ll recognize them:

• The correct definition of ‘game’
• Narrative vs Mechanics
• Randomness vs Skill
• The importance of realism
• Casual vs Hardcore

Many were (and are) merely the irritated observations of game players picking at specific games. However, with a flip of the rhetorical switch, players become designers expressing a universal design truth. Opinions inevitably differ and thus positions harden in the absence of data. And it snowballs from there.

Thankfully, as a developer community, we've grown older. With time and the accumulation of thousands published games, experienced game makers have a lot more insight into how game design actually works. It turns out there’s plenty of room for nuance.

There’s also the growing maturity to ignore false dichotomies and worn out talking points. Honestly, we don’t have time any more. We should be making great games, not arguing ancient design politics.

In the spirit of becoming a forward looking designer, here are my top 5 design debates that I've ignored in 2014.

#1 The correct definition of 'Game'

I've seen a metric ton of definitions for game over the years and have dabbled in crafting them myself. Not a single one has been useful to me in my daily practice of making great games.

Why this discussion is outdated
Games are vast and varied. A single definition tends have one or more of the following issues:

• Overly broad: The definition is unable to provide any direction or guidance.
• Overly narrow: The definition eliminates useful tools and influences from other areas of systems, thought or art.
• Overly convoluted: The definition is only useful to lawyers who care primarily about edge cases and not about getting things done.

Alternative discussions to have instead
I focus on finding and exploring useful design tools. I don’t need to care about the definition of ‘woodworking’ in order to be damned happy that hammers and nails exist. The same goes for games. I focus on scaffolding. And loot drop tables. And internal economies.

A useful goal is to find general tools that a smart designer can use to radically improve their work. Like any tool, they should to be applied in the proper context. So they are rarely universal or one-size fits all. And like a craft tool, they need to be applied with skill. They aren’t a pattern that you toss at a problem and get a fixed result.

Recommendation: Build your flexible design toolbox. Master those tools. Apply them where appropriate. Ignore pedants obsessed with defining ‘game’.

#2 Narrative vs mechanics

Science was once plagued by the idea that certain behavior derived entirely from genetics (nature) or entirely from environmental effects (nurture). This turned out to be a naive simplification of a vastly most intricate and interrelated system genetic predispositions, environmental triggers and feedback loops.

Narrative and mechanics have proven to be similarly intertwined.

Why this discussion is outdated
In the end, the human brain has neither a pure systemic understanding the world. Nor does it have a purely narrative understanding of the world. Memory, learning, emotional triggers, cause and effect all feed into how our brain adapts to environmental mechanics and then flow out again as a social response.

So the model suggested by the supposed conflict is simply broken. There is no ‘versus’.

There are many explanations for how this argument even arose. My favorite: A cocky tribe from old linear media clashed with an isolated tribe of game makers. They fought a stupid fight about authority and status that had almost nothing to do with making games. Meh.

Alternative discussions to have instead
A modern discussion could include:

• What existing schemas are activated by my game?
• How should we implement learning and scaffolding structures?
• What is the impact of various forms of stimuli within game loops?
• How should we tighten or loosen our systems of cause and effect?
• What are systems of pacing?
• What social role does narrative serve? How can we engineer human systems to encourage it?

Theories like Interaction Loops or Emotion Engineering integrate narrative and mechanics. In the process of banging our heads against building great interactive experiences, we've been forced to break down ‘narrative’ and ‘mechanics’ into atomic chunks and see how they fit in practice. Let’s discuss the rich synthesis of story, world building and mechanical techniques that thrives in interactive systems.

Recommendation: Consider how narrative emerges from existing mechanics. And consider how theme illuminates mechanics by activating existing mental schema. We need holistic, integrated models. Ignore antagonistic dichotomies.

#3 Randomness vs Skill

There’s been a sad resurgence of this 80’s wargamer rant. Randomness is obsessively derided as less masterful or strategic relative to pure skill games.

Why this discussion is outdated
Randomness is just another design tool. Used with skill, it yields some amazing games.

• Random systems are rife with mastery. ‘Randomness’ can provide strong elements of mastery, in terms of learning distributions, managing options and adapting to new situations.
• Games involve loops. Random outputs almost never occurs in isolation, but are part of an internal game economy. Randomness is often an essential tool for creating strategic variation and context.
• There are different, equally valid playstyles. Not everyone is a rigidly intellectual young man who desires only mental-skill games that let them dominate others. Some play to relax, some to socialize, some for physical mastery, some to feel part of a shared purpose. Randomness can be a beneficial tool when designing for these players.

Alternate discussions

• What games use randomness in interesting ways?
• How does your game use randomness as skill?
• How does randomness map onto noise?
• What are other noise generators? Complexity noise, social noise, feedback noise, etc.
• How do we make people better through play?

Recommendation: Practice using randomness where appropriate. Explore the space. Make a game with randomness that is about mastery. If you happen to be someone that values intellectual rigor over chance, make a game for someone other than yourself. Stretch your humanity.

#4 Realism

Past futurists sold a vision where games must inevitably become indistinguishable from reality. We marketed the hell out of that vision to the point it became dogma. You bought a new console, a new video card, a new computer to creep ever closer to the dream. You argued for 1080p as a paladin fighting for the glorious Holodeckian cause.

Why this discussion is outdated
Realism in graphics or simulations no longer is a dominant goal for most game developers. In practice, it turned out it wasn't really an essential feature for a successful games. In our far future era, you can snub realism and still make a billion dollars with a game like Minecraft or Puzzle & Dragons.

• Realism has niche appeal. It is an aesthetic choice that tends to appeal to a singular sub-culture that we've trained with our decades of marketing. Cartoons, text and other stylized forms of representation are also appealing.
• Realism can be an unnecessary expense. We sometimes wholesale replicate reality when we don’t know what specific stimuli actually appeals to players. It is sort of a shotgun approach that wastes vast amount of effort to hopefully make something interesting. A substantial portion of the exponential escalating cost of game development can be attributed directly to the pursuit of realism.
• Simulation adds design risk: Many simulations are complex and difficult to manipulate. They also are not inherently emotionally satisfying. Insisting on mechanical realism while simultaneously trying to make a fun game tends to yield failed game designs.
• Games are also endogenous systems of value. They are like little self contained baubles of math that set up interesting internal relationships. A game like Tetris has immensely value independent of references to the real world.
• When players ask for realism, they often aren't asking for realism. The desire for realism is often best understood in terms of how players learn and apply existing mental schema to new system. A request for realism could be: A new player asking for a metaphor that helps them understand an abstract system. Or it could be an advanced player pointing out unnecessary edge cases. Both these have solutions outside belabored realism.

Alternative discussions to have instead

• What is the right art style for your audience?
• What are the trade offs between art style, production concerns and budget?
• What sort of math or systems are interesting independent of their appearance in the real world?
• How do we make game-like, cartoon-like, info rich, surreal virtual reality games?

Recommendation: Ask what utilitarian feedback your game truly needs. Invest your art resources making those elements amazing. Ask what level of modeling a system needs to create rich gameplay. Invest your design resources to create a tiny rule set with deep emergence. Be smart. Be frugal. When someone demands realism, try to figure out what they really want.

#5 Casual vs Hardcore

There’s a set of cultural stereotypes that casual players act one way while hardcore players act another. A surprising number of design decisions are made based off these stereotypes.

Why this discussion is outdated
The casual and hardcore stereotypes suffer from the problems typical of stereotypes. They are gross simplifications that yield the incorrect design decisions.

• Many of the stereotypes are simply wrong: The longest average playtimes? Not console or PC. Handheld games, particularly those ‘kiddy’ Nintendo titles dominate session length. Regular daily play happens more often on smartphones and tablets than it does on consoles. When I look at data, there are very few ‘casual’ or ‘hardcore’ stereotypes that hold true. And when they do there are massive exceptions. 
• The variation within a specific game is huge: You've got a half dozen or more distinct playstyles within almost any game of reasonable complexity. Each game is a vast city with many different people living within it. Mere averages tell you very little about how to improve the state of your game.
• The market is shifting: Service-based games are driving for improved retention by doubling down on play. Women are playing more. Console owners are aging and slowing down. A lot of the old lessons about demographics and play styles have shifted. And they’ll continue to change in the future.

I see ‘casual’ or ‘hardcore’ as poisoned tribal labels like ‘gamer’ or ‘skinner box’. Mostly they are just weaponized stereotypes, deployed to enforce perceived group boundaries. They have little productive place in a modern design (or marketing) discussion.

Alternative discussions to have instead

• How do you break out of thinking in cheap stereotypes in order to gain an advantage over the dinosaurs that don't see the market has it truly exists?
• How do different groups unique to your game behave? (Hint: We can get the data!)
• What motivates the groups unique to your game?
• How do you include diverse hooks to appeal to multiple passionate audiences?
• How do you make a targeted niche game using iteration with a live community?

Recommendation
No one really makes 'hardcore' or 'casual' games. At best, we use existing markets, tribes and distribution channels to get a tentative foothold in a player’s psyche. But then it gets complicated. Embrace the complexity of your players. Learn who they actually are. Create elegant solutions that serve your many types of players.

Thoughts for 2015

If you happen to find yourself facing these 5 topics: Turn away. Our creative lives are limited. Pour your time into something productive.

• Teachers that spread these memes: Consider teaching modern game design tools. Cull disproved dogma. 
• Academics that expound on these ideas: Stop naive theory crafting and start referencing nuanced data from working designers.
• Students that gnaw at these bones: Arguing ancient talking points in comment sections gets you nowhere in life. Make games instead. Base your design conversations around your hands-on experiments. You'll learn more, faster. 

Goodness knows that conversations on dead design ideas will not end. Players and their innumerable derivatives (fan press, forum warriors, cultural critics, etc) continue talking about these topics. Some talk for entertainment. Some for status. Some for business. Some talk about their game experiences in order to process them mentally and emotionally. For many of these purposes, simplistic polarizing hooks are more enticing than deep comprehension.

So these inane design views become practically tradition, or at least common hazing rituals. Like yelling at televised football games. Or laughing at trucknuts. Sure, players aren't having a productive craft conversation, but they shouldn't be judged by the same rubric. Consider their chatter a cultural performance.

As for designers, you have a different role to fill. Recognize when you are accidentally acting like a uninformed player or student. Instead of getting caught up in the babble of ill-informed internet backwash, try talking directly with other working designers. Build tools and knowledge together.

Here's to a more productive 2015,
Danc.

It’s almost 2015. That seems impossible. That’s too futuristic-sounding to be the actual date on a real calendar. It looks more like a “stardate” or like the coordinates some mad scientist should be punching into the console of his time machine.

At a purely rational level, of course, I accept that it is now December of 2014 and that in less than two weeks it will be the following calendar year and I will need to start writing “2015″ on checks. But some part of my brain still associates that number with the future. Just look again at IGN’s terrific science fiction timeline, or the one at scifi.wikia.

It can’t be 2015 yet, because that’s the future world of hoverboards and holograms from Back to the Future II.

If it’s already 2015, then that means within just four years — during the current term of U.S. senators elected last month — replicants will roam the streets of a rain-soaked dystopian Los Angeles (Blade Runner), the most popular TV show in the world will be The Running Man, and an electromagnetic pulse will turn the Pacific Northwest into a militarized police state patrolled by flying drones (Dark Angel). Those stories were all set in 2019.

I’ve been absorbing stories like those my whole life, and along with that, I’ve acquired the odd half-held sense that the future is a fictional place — that 2015 and 2019 are not real places, but simply the fictional setting for fantastical stories. So, partly at least, the idea that it’s almost 2015 strikes me as like being told that in a couple of weeks we’ll all be in Narnia.

As the years pass by, though, all of those science fiction stories and their futuristic settings have also reinforced a kind of automatic skepticism in response to any predictions made about future-sounding dates. Remember Space 1999? How about 2001: A Space Odyssey? Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles were set nine years ago.

So while part of my brain is thinking that it can’t possibly be 2015, another part of my brain is thinking “OK, so it’s 2015 — don’t expect to see any hoverboards, though.”

The problem is that neither of those reactions is helpful when I encounter scientist’s predictions about the impending, near-term future. Consider, for example, the projection that by the year 2030, the city of Philadelphia will face more than 30 days of significant flooding every year.

I just wrote “the year 2030″ because 2030, to me, still doesn’t quite seem like a four-digit number automatically recognizable as a date. Yet of course it is. And it’s only 15 years away. That’s really soon.

To absorb the implications of that, I have to focus on that point — 15 years from now, not “2030.”

Here’s David Roberts sketching out some of what we can expect for those intervening 15 years, and why it won’t do to think of this planning for the future as an exercise in science fiction:

Rising sea levels don’t have to rise very much before they get annoying, and then burdensome, and then overwhelming. This fact is well-captured in some interesting new research from NOAA scientists William Sweet and Joseph Park. (Over on Mashable, reporter Andrew Freedman has a great write-up.)

Rather than focus on average sea level, researchers focused on the frequency of “nuisance-level” flooding events, defined as water one or two feet higher than local high-tide level. (The name is deceptive — it’s expensive to clean up and repair after such events, especially if they reach vulnerable infrastructure.) Two important insights emerged.

First, the frequency of nuisance-level flooding is rising faster than average sea level, and on a non-linear trajectory. Such floods are already five to 10 times more common than they were 50 years ago. Long before the sea rises far enough to literally swamp coastal towns and cities, it will rise enough to bedevil them with frequent floods.

Second, lots of American cities and towns are on the verge of serious trouble. The researchers identified 30 or more days of nuisance-level flooding a year as a “tipping point,” the level at which flooding goes from burdensome to overwhelming. The tipping point has already passed in some places and it’s rapidly approaching in others.

This may not be an issue in the 2016 election, but it surely will be in the presidential election that follows it. “The year 2020″ is just five years from now. And by then places like Charleston and Baltimore and Atlantic City will already be dealing with more than a month of flooding every year.

The future is here. Better start swimming or sink like a stone.

 

 

Those are tough statistics to absorb:

A majority of Americans think that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half of the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By a margin of almost 2 to 1 — 59 percent to 31 percent — those interviewed said that they support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying that they produced valuable intelligence. In general, 58 percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”

This is neoconservatism’s biggest victory since the invasion of Iraq. It means, first of all, a culture immune to fact. The Senate Report concludes from a mountain of CIA documents that no good intelligence was procured through torture – and yet by 2 – 1, Americans prefer to believe a fantasy, peddled only by the torturers themselves. The only fantasy many are prepared to abandon is that the CIA’s program was not somehow “torture”. For that admission, those of us who have tried to exhume and explain the grisly facts can receive some credit. But that credit is instantly wiped out by the fact that even when it is torture, most Americans support it.

In this struggle, we always knew we could never undo the horrors of the past. What we were trying to do was to expose a criminal conspiracy at the heart of the American government to subvert the law and adopt the tactics of totalitarian states toward prisoners – in order to prevent any of it ever happening again. We achieved the one at the expense of the other. No one can seriously doubt that there was a conspiracy, that it involved the knowing subversion of the rule of law, that it committed acts of absolute evil, and that it sunk America’s international reputation to unprecedented lows. Yet a majority of Americans endorse all of it. Because 9/11.

And the staggering levels of support for torture by Christians merely reveals that very few of them are Christians at all. Torture is not a gray area for Christians. It is the darkest stain there is. And the fact that 65 percent of white Catholics back torture tells you a lot about the terribly weak leadership of the bishops on this core and central issue. They were more interested in how to stop women getting contraceptives than standing up and being counted on torture.

Several factors play into this: the shameless and relentless campaign by the torturers to insist they did nothing wrong and even, against all the evidence, “saved lives”; the impact of CIA-blessed popular culture fantasies like “24” or “Zero Dark Thirty” which made torture seem heroic; the fathomless pragmatism of president Obama, utterly in hock to the CIA; the bureaucratic skills and sabotaging of the report by John Brennan; the broader polarization that meant that if one political party endorsed war crimes as a policy, roughly half the population would fall in line; the paranoia and panic that Bush and Cheney spread after 9/11; and the underlying American propensity for rationalizing revenge and violence, especially against anyone with dark skin and a funny name.

As an immigrant to America, this is a bit of a gut-check, to say the least. A reader channels some of what I’m feeling:

I’m a naturalized US citizen, as is my wife and kids. My wife and I were born and raised in Ireland, our kids born in London but we moved to US when they were very young. Even before this thoroughly depressing week of news on torture and politics in general, both my kids (now in college) made uncoordinated separate comments that they are now not sure if they see any future in staying in the US. My son has even opted to go to college in Canada, he feels so strongly about it.

As I read more and more of your coverage on the torture debate and the denials, it is starting to feel like I have been thrown into a dark dank pit and left to rot.

We’ve chosen this country at a moment when it has chosen to embrace torture as an instrument of policy. And that all but inverts the meaning of America.

For me, America has always been about freedom. You can criticize this country all you want, and of course it has its flaws. But that it gives countless millions a new chance at life, that it embraces hard work and new voices, that it values experimentation and exploration, that it churns with an individualism and a vibrancy found almost nowhere else is indisputable. It’s why I fell in love with America almost as soon as I got here.

But the embrace of state-enforced torture against prisoners is not just a flaw in that freedom; it is its utter negation. If a state can torture anyone – including an American citizen like Jose Padilla – limited government is over. Torture gives the torturer the ability to create fact and evidence, to enable further torture and further new “facts” to perpetuate whatever public line a government wants to propagate. It is the most extreme example of how the power of the state can utterly destroy the agency of a human being. It is tyranny in its most concentrated and totalist form. It is the negation of the Constitution. The expulsion of it from Western Europe over the last few centuries was a sine qua non for the emergence of democratic life and culture. And yet America has now reinstated it as a core part of the republic. If we ever allow a Republican to be president again, it could well return.

Despair is one option. But it is a weak one. Becoming or being an American seems to me to be to embrace a struggle, not to bask in perfection. What we have to do now is very hard. It is not to allow this to be put in the rear-view mirror, as president Obama shamelessly wants us to do; it is not to acquiesce to a government which has no effective way to regulate or control its own deep state; it is not to wallow in cheap contempt for most Americans’ comfort with barbarism, as long as it is their barbarism. It is, quite simply, to keep pursuing the facts and to keep pursuing the war criminals. What we need is a careful strategy for first firing and then prosecuting these criminals still walking the halls at Langley. There are no statutes of limitations on these grave crimes against humanity. The only limit to securing justice in this is our patience and fortitude. And we need to have copious supplies of both.

I didn’t get your (2), if there is one, and I feel like I’ve already said enough about how I feel about anti-kink arguments that don’t concern themselves with the difference between “men actually coerce women into submission” and “people of various genders engage in various forms of consensual play and fantasy.” 

(Also, I’ve suffered abuse in kink contexts, and you know who came to help me?  NOT THOSE FUCKERS.  Ethically kinky people are the ones who actually showed up to support me.)

So I’m just going to say:

That is, no matter who you are and what you do, there is someone on the Internet who thinks people like you should be kept in dank caves away from polite society.

And it hurts so much worse when it feels like it’s coming from someone on the same “side” as you.  Hell, I’m not immune to it; when people email me “lol u fat hairy feminazi suk my dick” I’m like “yeah whatever” and save it because sometimes I like to get drunk and read those emails in funny voices at parties.  But when people email me “you are enabling abuse and oppressing women,” it hits me in a different, far more vulnerable place.  When someone shares some of your values and disapproves of you, it’s a lot harder to brush off.  And sometimes you shouldn’t.  Sometimes you should question yourself.

But sometimes you just have to live your life.  You have to come to the point of “my behavior is in accordance with my morality, I have questioned myself to my satisfaction, and now I’m done.”  You have to go beyond “please, listen to my side of the story” and arrive at “I am so comfortable with myself, and so little interested at ripping my soul out for inspection every time a random stranger demands it, that instead of making myself vulnerable to this whole discussion I’m going to do a little butt-dance.”

I realize you’re not at that point yet.   (There are many, many issues where I’m not at it myself.)  But I want you to consider that as a goal.  Not just answering the “am I a terrible person for having the wrong kind of sexual fantasies?” question, but having confidence in your answer, confidence to the point of even being a dick about it, the kind of confidence that becomes a shield.

hootthewonderowl:

africanaquarian:

sinbadism:

africanaquarian:

it’s wild how america is basically a dystopia but we’re conditioned almost immediately upon starting school to believe that it’s not and that it’s the pinnacle of freedom

i mean, that in itself is kind of the hallmark of a dystopian nation

yeah.

holy shit.

by Will Wilkinson

Here is one of the most spectacular shifts in public opinion in our lifetime.

What explains this?

Don’t ask the psychologist and social scientists who study political opinion. They don’t know.

One family of influential theories says that our political opinions are “motivated” by certain deep-seated emotional needs. According to one version, the “system justification theory” of Jon Jost, variation in the need to justify the status quo distribution of goods and power in society determines whether one has a broadly liberal or conservative worldview. In other versions of the needs-based theory, our opinions are said to be fixed by the degree to which we are or are not dominated by a need to preserve comforting illusions, or, alternatively, the need to manage uncertainty and fear.

A related line of inquiry posits that variations in political opinion arise from ingrained differences in personality and moral sensibility. Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations theory” is probably the best-known. Variation on the six foundations of the moral sense explains whether you have a liberal, conservative, or libertarian cast of mind. All these theories imply that our “values” and corresponding political views reflect idiosyncrasies of personality more than material interests. Indeed, the current consensus view among political psychologists and public-opinion researchers is that, contrary to older tradition in economics and political science, self-interest explains very little about our political alignments and commitments.

What is often overlooked is that both old-fashioned self-interest theories and new-fangled personality-based theories of political opinion are pretty much useless in accounting for the sort of sea change in opinion captured by the chart above. Was there a wild change in people’s interests between 1996 and now? No. Did the distribution of personality types in the American population undergo a rapid transformation. No. It’s a lot simpler than that. People changed their minds.

Until recently, the prevailing belief in our culture was that homosexuality is a sort of mental illness and that it’s practice threatens the integrity of the family and, thereby, the integrity of the entire social order. Almost anyone who has adopted these beliefs, whatever their temperament or interests, is going to want to think that it is in his or her interests, and in the interests of society generally, to officially discourage homosexuality. But when large numbers of people stop believing, as a matter of empirical fact, that there is something unhealthy or socially dangerous about homosexuality, opinion about its “justifiability” – and about the justice of denying equal rights to gay and lesbian couples – changes without any corresponding change in anyone’s underlying psychology or interests. Indeed, support for gay marriage has accelerated and opposition has weakened most rapidly as the old speculative worries are disproven by the anodyne, homey reality of families headed by officially-sanctioned same-sex couples.

Beliefs matter. Public opinion will always reflect factional interest and the range of temperaments. But we have no magical ability to intuit what’s in our interests; we can only ever act on beliefs about our interests. And moral personality may be more or less fixed, but the things that dispositionally conservative or liberal happen to believe change a great deal over time as beliefs about the world change. I’m of the generation that was in young adulthood in 1996, at the start of that Gallup chart, when opposition to gay marriage seemed insurmountable. Over the past two decades I’ve seen conservative-minded friends go from profound moralized disgust about homosexuality to shrugging indifference as their beliefs around the nature and consequences of homosexual behavior have drifted with the cultures. My father’s generation went through something similar with respect to mixed-race relationships. Now it’s true that we are imperfectly rational creatures, and that there is a great deal of “motivated cognition” – a tendency to believe what we find comforting to believe. But I think it’s clear enough that these are frictions that can be overcome, and often are overcome. This is a cause for hope.

One of the great issues of our day is prison reform. America imprisons a larger share of its population than any other country on Earth. The main reason for this is that, over the last few decades, thanks in large part to the War on Drugs, we have changed sentencing guidelines such that more crimes are met with prison sentences, and sentences for most crimes have become longer. It can seem that the American carceral state is so dug in that it is impossible to change it. But I think it is largely a matter of belief. At some point in the past, we came to believe that we were too soft on crime – that punishments were unjustly and dangerously lax – so we made them harsher. To turn things around, we’ve simply got to change our minds again. Punishments are too harsh. Millions of Americans who do not deserve to be put in cages are put in cages, and millions who deserve to put in cages for a time are kept there for far too long, often ruining their entire lives. This is an appalling injustice, even aside from the appallingly unjust racial bias in the system. This should be intolerable for country culturally committed to an ideal of liberty. But we can change it. We’re not locked in by a confluence of interests or by intractable features of the tough-on-crime conservative personality. Americans simply need to believe that such long prisons sentences are wrong. Americans need to believe that crime-rates are at a historic low, that high incarceration rates are not the main reason why, and that they and their children will not be endangered by reforms that restore proportionality, judicial discretion, and justice to sentencing.

Now, some progressives are fixated on the idea that a vague set of systemic social forces they call “neoliberalism” is responsible for the American gulag state – and everything else wrong the world. The implication is that things can’t get better until we throw over neoliberalism (whatever that is) and replace it with a rarely-specified utopia of social justice. This is pernicious nonsense. Rather than move us closer to social justice, the all-or-nothing, everything-is-connected holism of the anti-neoliberals pushes us instead toward fatalistic complacency and impotent shotgun gestures against “the system.” Andrew’s focused, reasoned arguments in favor of gay marriage in time caught on and now Andrew is married. This should be our model. If Andrew and Jon Rauch and all the others who doggedly, patiently, and rationally made the case for gay marriage had instead chosen to rage against the comprehensive injustice of the machine and the cold hypocrisy of the American heart, it never would have happened. You can’t change the system by changing beliefs about the system. You change the system one issue, and one constellation of convictions, at a time.

i know i am in the minority here: but i cant give a shit about “the interview” being pulled. it falls in the dubious union of a venn diagram of total disinterest for me: american propaganda and judd apotow films.

it is not some great attack on “artistic” freedom that sony was hacked, or that the film was pulled. it is evidence of the machinations of hollywood as a capitalist lobbying force for american imperialism.

you know the film i want to see? the one that as handily satirizes american crimes as it does those of other nations. a film the state department does not literally give its approval to (as it did “the interview”).

the fact that every liberal i know is ready to die on that hill for their fantastical notion that our nation’s marketing department is entitled to say whatever they want about other nations in a world of violent political intrigue, oh, excuse me, i mean “artistic freedom” and “democracy” just leaves me contemptuous.

you want to defend revolutionary media exposing human rights crimes? put some ferguson protestors on a payroll. until then, shut the fuck up please.

Sony Kept Thousands of Passwords in a Folder Named "Password":

Beautiful

by Michelle Dean

The news about humanity is never very good when it comes from Reddit, is it? Today’s contribution comes via an editorial at WIRED. Its authors, Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang, are scientists at MIT. They described the gendered horror show that was their Reddit AMA:

Within an hour, the thread had rocketed to the Reddit front page, with hundreds of thousands of pageviews and more than 4,700 comments. But to our surprise, the most common questions were about why our gender was relevant at all. Some people wondered why we did not simply present ourselves as “computer scientists.” Others questioned if calling attention to gender perpetuated sexism. Yet others felt that we were taking advantage of the fact that we were women to get more attention for our AMA.

The interactions in the AMA itself showed that gender does still matter. Many of the comments and questions illustrated how women are often treated in male-dominated STEM fields. Commenters interacted with us in a way they would not have interacted with men, asking us about our bra sizes, how often we “copy male classmates’ answers,” and even demanding we show our contributions “or GTFO [Get The **** Out]”. One redditor helpfully called out the double standard, saying, “Don’t worry guys – when the male dog groomer did his AMA (where he specifically identified as male), there were also dozens of comments asking why his sex mattered. Oh no, wait, there weren’t.”

“Oh, it’s just Reddit,” you might be saying to yourself. As a seasoned 4chan conspiracy theorist myself –at this point I think “4chan prank” whenever some weird story begins to break, at first even wondering if the whole Sony leak could be a 4chan hoax, if they could have made up the whole document stash – I understand the impulse to brush this sort of thing off as trolling. It is that, and undoubtedly some of these comments come from the sort of pure unmitigated jerkery commonly found in the underbelly of the internet.

But it’s also something else. Because their comments aren’t all that far from ones I have heard myself, said with utter sincerity. Men don’t respond very well, still, to the notion that gender might be relevant. They might be a little meaner about it in anonymous spaces online, but you can see the problem everywhere.

One of the slim, ephemeral benefits of being publicly identifiable as a feminist is that I don’t tend to be in male-dominated or even male-only spaces very often. There is one giant exception to that. Years ago, I spent some time in a journalism school. An admissions fluke had me in a class that was overwhelmingly male. There was one other woman, but she dropped out early.

I knew I was in for it when in a very early class, one of the other students starting waxing philosophic about fact-checking and John D’Agata. And towards the end of this digression, he referred to the magazine The Believer. And then he referred to its editor as “Ben Marcus’s wife.” Full stop.

I’m polite. I’m Canadian. I waited for the discussion to come around to me. I said something like, “You know, her name is Heidi Julavits. I wouldn’t call her Ben Marcus’s wife, if I were you.” I meant it rather benevolently at the time. I was amused.

Now, to be clear, at the time the student registered chagrin. As I recall, he said something like, “Oof, that probably sounded sexist, didn’t it.” It did. There he had it. We moved on.

But the incident hardened into a parable within our small class. Mea culpa: I participated in this hardening by sometimes teasing the other student about his use of the phrase.

The parable didn’t come to be about him, though. It came to be about me, about what I was like, meaning that I was the kind of person who’d insensitively attack a man for making an inadvertently sexist comment. And gradually, the story became a way for the other male students to express their frustrations with my views of the world. I remember very clearly one of them bringing it up – it seemed to come up way too often – months later and saying, “There was nothing wrong with what he said. Ben Marcus is more famous than Heidi Julavits.”

Now, you could be forgiven for not wanting to do the fine filigree work of parsing reputations here. Suffice to say that I don’t think either Marcus or Julavits would be upset if I said that neither of them was particularly famous. I do, actually contend, that even within the kind of meager fame literary circles bestow on writers and editors like them, that Julavits is likely better known. This may only be true because Marcus writes experimental fiction and she is involved with more widely accessible work. (The latter is not an insult in my world.)

But that isn’t the point. The point is it’s odd to classify a woman as someone’s wife, particularly in a professional context, and no, your gut feeling that someone is more famous does not get us away from the problem with the phrase. Even if you didn’t “mean” to be sexist, the identifier “somebody’s wife” is a remnant of sexism. Women take it personally. They should. It was long used as a way to inform women that, as in Rebecca Solnit’s phrase, “This is not their world.”

The tossed off remark was only the spark of the larger problem, though. When I said something that day, and even later when I teased the student, I wasn’t trying to be a warrior for gender justice. I was trying to gently remind a bunch of young men that they, too, should pay attention to the names of women. It was almost friendly professional advice, because it was quite possible that they’d end up pitching stories to her.

Nonetheless, it labelled me as the person in the class who “made things” about gender. It made me the butt of these young men’s jokes. Which eventually had the result of making me angry with most of them, because there are only so many times you can hear from people that your apprehension of reality is incorrect before you start to get angry with them. I realize they might have felt the same way about me. But they outnumbered me at the time. Which they still do, by the way, just about everywhere in journalism that I’d actually like to go.

That’s another way of saying that besides injured feelings, I had history and statistics to be angry about. As do those MIT science professors.

• Model: Rydis U60, Rydis U60 Pro
• UV-C light kills microbes twice as much as normal vacs
• Handheld vac makes it easy to clean and disinfect furniture, mattresses, and even those dry-clean-only clothes you never dry clean
• A powerful 600W motor (AC power cord)
• "Pro" model adds a handle sensor that shuts off when you're not holding it, and lavender-scented air-freshening cartridge (so not much)

Engineers make great vacuum, execs screw them over.

Almost as soon as we got into the discount biz, we started hearing the old "fell off the truck" line, implying that our deals were acquired through means other than the diligence and skill of our buyers. Heaven forfend! But today we bring you the very happy ending to a story of fraud, deception, and vacuum cleaners.

SPOILER ALERT: crime pays. Not for the criminals, in this case, but for honest retailers like us and consumers like you.

As far as anybody could tell from their stack of awards for well-reviewed products like the Moneual Rydis UV-C Vacuum, Moneual just looked like a Korean start-up with an unpronounceable name and some innovative ideas about vacuum cleaners. CNet certainly had good things to say about the Moneual Rydis UV-C, pointing out that "the UV-C light, coupled with the different cleaning modes, give this vacuum an edge over much of the competition." So how did we get it so cheap? More on that in a second.

The Rydis vacuum's (literally) killer feature is its UV-C light, which Moneual claims will kill dust mites and bacteria, sterilizing those nasties right out of carpet, upholstery, or any other fabric. If you're thinking the idea of germicidal lights sounds as scammy as crystals or hologram bracelets, not this time. UV-C light kills microbes twice as much as normal vacs.

The engineers made a great vacuum. So what did the execs do?

Accusations are piling up that, while their engineers were diligently working to create the best handheld vacuums they could make, the company's top execs were basically using the company as a front for massive fraud.

In October, Moneual stunned the Korean financial and business world by filing for receivership (essentially what you and I might call bankruptcy), after failing to pay some US$463 million in export bonds held by two of South Korea's largest banks. Moneual's claims of penury made little sense from a company that had claimed revenue of 1.27 trillion won (US$1.18 billion) in 2013. Where had the won gone?

The answer wasn't long in coming. On October 31, Moneual founder Park Hong-seok was arrested by Korean authorities for filing false export documents, then using those inflated financials to secure huge loans to the tune of $3 billion. Along with buying a luxury island resort and taking lavish gambling junkets, Park is suspected of socking away over US$400 million in secret accounts in Hong Kong. A Korea Customs Service official called it "a large-scale fraud show."

According to a Moneual employee speaking to the Korea JoongAng Daily, this show had been running since the day the company was founded in 2008. And the cast extended way beyond Park. "A lot of employees", the anonymous employee says, "knew the company was rotten" as long ago as 2010. While a small team of designers and engineers worked on winning awards at the Consumer Electronics Show, the employee says, most of the "innovation" at Moneual was less wholesome. "It was easy to borrow loans by credit through cooked-up [export] revenue... The company said 90 percent of its sales were made in the U.S., but I have never seen our products in the U.S. market."

It isn't easy to pull off something like this alone, and prosecutors say Moneaul had help from the financial sector. The head of the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation, which had backed Moneaul based on the phony export figures, fled to the U.S. right before Moneaul filed for receivership. Investigations, as they say, are ongoing.

Moneaul's engineers aren't the only innocents caught in the fallout. Zalman Tech, known for their innovative PC fans and cooling systems, was acquired by Moneaul in 2011. It seems Moneaul was less interested in Zalman's fans than in their potential as a vehicle for more fraud. Prosecutors say Moneaul inflated Zalman's export reports just as they had done with the parent company's. Cleared of any wrongdoing, Zalman has survived by the skin of their teeth in a court-supervised restructuring.

Just about the only people to come out of this ahead are us, and you! Like the opportunistic hyenas we must be to survive, we pounced on these Moneual Rydis UV-C Vacuums. Who would have thought all that dirty money could get your fabrics so clean?

Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon about “10 things conservative Christians got horribly wrong.”

Looking over the long history of people claiming to be speaking for God’s wishes, it quickly becomes evident that Christians are frequently on the wrong side of history. Here are 10 things that American Christians of the conservative stripe got completely wrong when they were so sure they were speaking on God’s behalf.

I realize that Marcotte is both an atheist (gasp!) and, even worse, a feminist, and thus she’s not someone that conservative Christians are inclined to listen to. So let me point out that many politically conservative white evangelical men would agree with her on at least some of the items in her list.

For example, the first item on Amanda Marcotte’s list of “things conservative Christians got horribly wrong” is slavery. Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore agrees with her. Here’s what Moore recently said on that topic:

The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention were wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery. And the problem wasn’t just that they were on the wrong side of a social issue; they were on the wrong side of Jesus and the gospel when it came to brothers and sisters in Christ made in the image of God that they treated with injustice.

Moore would probably (I think) agree with about half of Marcotte’s list. I’m guessing he’d also agree that conservative Christians who defended segregation were “horribly wrong.” And I’d guess he would agree that Prohibition was a mistake, and that opposing women’s suffrage was wrong (but not opposing women’s ordination). And I’m pretty sure he would say now that evangelicals’ hostile anti-Catholicism during the 19th and most of the 20th centuries was something that shouldn’t have happened.

But he would likely disagree — strenuously — with the other half of Marcotte’s list, which includes things like evolution, official prayer in schools, contraception and marriage equality.*

On all of those points, of course, Moore and his fellow “conservative” Christians would insist that their own opinions aren’t the issue here. What matters, rather, is what the Bible clearly says. It’s not that “conservative Christians” reject evolution, but that the Bible insists it’s wrong. And same-sex marriage is anathema not because “conservative Christians” think so, but because that is what the Bible clearly teaches. And contraception is wrong because the Bible clearly says so (right there in … um … I’ll have to get back to you with chapter and verse on that one).

These conservative Christians would object to Marcotte’s assertion that they are wrong on these matters. What she’s really saying, they would say, is that the Bible is wrong about such things.

The problem with that argument is that this is exactly what those earlier conservative Christians said about slavery, segregation, women’s suffrage, Prohibition, and the Papist Menace. If Russell Moore’s Southern Baptist predecessors had been confronted with Moore’s claim that they were “wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery,” they wouldn’t have defended their opinion — they would have said it wasn’t about their opinion, but about the clear teaching and inerrant authority of the holy Word of God. And then they’d have viciously attacked Moore for his refusal to accept the clear and unambiguous authority of scripture.

This isn’t speculation about how they would respond. This is what they actually did. Those pro-slavery Southern Baptists were — regularly and repeatedly — accused of being wickedly wrong about slavery. And their response — documented in thousands of volumes — was always to attack their accusers for infidelity to the clear teaching of the Bible.

Anti-slavery Christians, in response, insisted they weren’t criticizing the Bible itself, only the way that pro-slavery Christians had chosen to interpret the Bible. The problem isn’t with what the Bible says, they argued, but with how the pro-slavery Southern Baptists were reading it and misusing it.

But that response only made those pro-slavery Baptists angrier. There can be only one way to read the Bible, they insisted. There can be only one way to interpret it. More than that, really what they were arguing was that the Bible didn’t need to be interpreted at all.

That claim is the identifying characteristic of the people Marcotte identifies as “conservative Christians.” They all share this idea that the Bible is uniform and unambiguous — that despite being a diverse collection of ancient texts written over a period of centuries in diverse contexts for diverse audiences, it never displays a diversity of perspectives. The Bible, they insist, never contradicts itself and never presents opposing views, and thus requires little interpretation for a contemporary reader.

Unfortunately, while this view of the Bible is horrifically misleading, it’s also widely accepted not just by conservative Christians, but by many of their critics. Thus we see things like Marcotte writing “the Bible clearly has a positive view of slavery” — uncritically accepting not just the illiterate anti-hermeneutic of the fundies, but even their favorite thought-suppressing adverb (“the Bible clearly …”). 

The Bible does, in fact, contain a great deal of material that endorses various forms of slavery. That is undeniable. Slavery is, in various parts of the Bible, commended and commanded. In some places in the Bible, an abundance of slaves is presented as evidence of God’s blessing.

But the Bible also does, in fact, contain a great deal of material that attacks slavery. That is also undeniable. Slavery is, in various parts of the Bible, condemned as contemptible. In some places in the Bible, an abundance of slaves is presented as evidence of wickedness, disobedience and rebellion against God.

Such contradictory arguments can be bewildering if you haven’t got some way of determining which part of this biblical argument is the winning side. (Jubilee, people, it’s always about Jubilee. All of it.)

But there’s no way of doing that if you’ve decided ahead of time that such intra-biblical disputes cannot be allowed to exist. Pretending they don’t exist doesn’t make them go away. Refusing to acknowledge their existence doesn’t make them vanish in a puff of smoke — no matter how much “conservative Christians” wish that it were so.

This is a huge problem for 21st-century white evangelicals. Like Russell Moore, they’re mostly convinced — now — that white evangelical support for slavery had been a terrible mistake. Yet they still want to cling to the pro-slavery Christians’ insistence that the Bible is uniform and unambiguous and that no interpretation is necessary to understand what it clearly says.

So while they’re pretty sure those earlier, pro-slavery Christians were wrong, they’re not able to explain how or why they were wrong. And thus, today, they are also unable to explain how or why they themselves are right about all the things they claim “the Bible clearly says.”

If those early Southern Baptists were wrong about slavery, then they were wrong about the Bible — wrong about how to read the Bible. They were wrong about slavery because they were wrong about how to read the Bible.

Contemporary white evangelicals want to retain the same approach to reading the Bible, but not the same conclusions about slavery. That doesn’t work.

If you want to retain the anti-hermeneutic of the early Southern Baptists while rejecting their pro-slavery views, then you can’t say, “The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention were wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery.” You have to say, instead, that the Bible itself used to be wrong and wickedly wrong on slavery, but somehow isn’t anymore (even though it never changed).

If you’re not willing to reject that anti-hermeneutic, then you have to say that the Bible itself used to be wrong about a lot of things.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* I’m a bit worried about mentioning item No. 4 on Amanda Marcotte’s list:

4) Pain relief for childbirth. The Bible explicitly lays out pain in childbirth as Eve’s punishment for sin, so unsurprisingly, that’s what many Christians in the 19th century believed had to be so. Once reliable pain relief in childbirth began to be developed, therefore, there was a lot of resistance to it from Christians who feared it defied God to let women have some relief. … Eventually, the argument that women owed it to God to suffer through childbirth faded to the fringes of right-wing Christianity.

It’s true that this was once conventional wisdom — a widespread argument that shaped common practice. Childbirth was seen as something that ought to be painful, because Eve. Today, though, that argument is a mostly forgotten relic of history.

But today we also have a reflexively polarized religious right that trips over itself in a rush to oppose anything and everything that we evil liberals and baby-killers view approvingly. Just by mentioning stuff like this, we may be giving them ideas. If Amanda Marcotte approves of reliable pain relief in childbirth, that probably means that Barack Obama does too. And Sandra Fluke and Rachel Held Evans and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Brian McLaren and Planned Parenthood. Probably even Rob Bell.

And once they realize that, they’re likely to start angrily opposing such pain relief as another evil symptom of women’s lib and the sexual revolution. After all, if bearing children isn’t as painful and dangerous as it was back in the Golden Age, then it’s like we’re giving these wanton hussies permission to go out and do the sex without the fear of pain and suffering that God intended to accompany such filthy behavior, etc., etc.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, keep in mind that this is exactly what has happened in recent years when it comes to the abruptly newfound white evangelical opposition to contraception — a position that has surged to prominence without any credible biblical, ethical, scientific or logical argument to support it.

“Nobody makes an IRC channel for no reason. Who are we doing this versus?”
— topic of #slatestarcodex

I.

Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat.

(this story makes more sense if you know Detroit is in a crisis where the bankrupt city government is trying to increase revenues by cracking down on poor people who can’t pay for the water they use.)

Predictably, the move has caused a backlash. The International Business Times, in what I can only assume is an attempted pun, describes them as “drowning in backlash”. Groundswell thinks it’s a “big blunder”. Daily Banter says it’s “exactly why everyone hates PETA”. Jezebel calls them “assholes”, and we can all agree Jezebel knows a thing or two about assholery.

Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography.

People call these things “blunders”, but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of them. Everybody has heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable stupid debates about “did this publicity stunt cross the line?”

While not everyone is a vegan, pretty much everybody who knows anything about factory farming is upset by it. There is pretty much zero room for PETA to convert people from pro-factory-farming to anti-factory-farming, because there aren’t any radical grassroot pro-factory-farming activists to be found. Their problem isn’t lack of agreement. It’s lack of publicity.

PETA creates publicity, but at a cost. Everybody’s talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is “I hate them and they make me really angry.” Some of the talk is even “I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad.”

So there’s a tradeoff here, with Vegan Outreach on one side and PETA on the other.

Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree in principle that factory-farming is bad, but no one will pay any attention to it.

And PETA can get everyone to pay attention to factory farming, but a lot of people who would otherwise oppose it will switch to supporting it just because they’re so mad at the way it’s being publicized.

But at least they’re paying attention!

PETA doesn’t shoot themselves in the foot because they’re stupid. They shoot themselves in the foot because they’re traveling up an incentive gradient that rewards them for doing so, even if it destroys their credibility.

II.

The University of Virginia rape case profiled in Rolling Stone has fallen apart. In doing so, it joins a long and distinguished line of highly-publicized rape cases that have fallen apart. Studies often show that only 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false. Yet the rate for allegations that go ultra-viral in the media must be an order of magnitude higher than this. As the old saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?

Several people have remarked that false accusers have more leeway to make their stories as outrageous and spectacular as possible. But I want to focus on two less frequently mentioned concerns.

The Consequentialism FAQ explains signaling in moral decisions like so:

When signaling, the more expensive and useless the item is, the more effective it is as a signal. Although eyeglasses are expensive, they’re a poor way to signal wealth because they’re very useful; a person might get them not because ey is very rich but because ey really needs glasses. On the other hand, a large diamond is an excellent signal; no one needs a large diamond, so anybody who gets one anyway must have money to burn.

Certain answers to moral dilemmas can also send signals. For example, a Catholic man who opposes the use of condoms demonstrates to others (and to himself!) how faithful and pious a Catholic he is, thus gaining social credibility. Like the diamond example, this signaling is more effective if it centers upon something otherwise useless. If the Catholic had merely chosen not to murder, then even though this is in accord with Catholic doctrine, it would make a poor signal because he might be doing it for other good reasons besides being Catholic – just as he might buy eyeglasses for reasons beside being rich. It is precisely because opposing condoms is such a horrendous decision that it makes such a good signal.

But in the more general case, people can use moral decisions to signal how moral they are. In this case, they choose a disastrous decision based on some moral principle. The more suffering and destruction they support, and the more obscure a principle it is, the more obviously it shows their commitment to following their moral principles absolutely. For example, Immanuel Kant claims that if an axe murderer asks you where your best friend is, obviously intending to murder her when he finds her, you should tell the axe murderer the full truth, because lying is wrong. This is effective at showing how moral a person you are – no one would ever doubt your commitment to honesty after that – but it’s sure not a very good result for your friend.

In the same way, publicizing how strongly you believe an accusation that is obviously true signals nothing. Even hard-core anti-feminists would believe a rape accusation that was caught on video. A moral action that can be taken just as well by an outgroup member as an ingroup member is crappy signaling and crappy identity politics. If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk about it in the context of the least credible case you can find.

But aside from that, there’s the PETA Principle (not to be confused with the Peter Principle). The more controversial something is, the more it gets talked about.

A rape that obviously happened? Shove it in people’s face and they’ll admit it’s an outrage, just as they’ll admit factory farming is an outrage. But they’re not going to talk about it much. There are a zillion outrages every day, you’re going to need something like that to draw people out of their shells.

On the other hand, the controversy over dubious rape allegations is exactly that – a controversy. People start screaming at each other about how they’re misogynist or misandrist or whatever, and Facebook feeds get filled up with hundreds of comments in all capital letters about how my ingroup is being persecuted by your ingroup. At each step, more and more people get triggered and upset. Some of those triggered people do emergency ego defense by reblogging articles about how the group that triggered them are terrible, triggering further people in a snowball effect that spreads the issue further with every iteration.

[source]

Only controversial things get spread. A rape allegation will only be spread if it’s dubious enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics. An obviously true rape allegation will only be spread if the response is controversial enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics – which is why so much coverage focuses on the proposal that all accused rapists should be treated as guilty until proven innocent.

Everybody hates rape just like everybody hates factory farming. “Rape culture” doesn’t mean most people like rape, it means most people ignore it. That means feminists face the same double-bind that PETA does.

First, they can respond to rape in a restrained and responsible way, in which case everyone will be against it and nobody will talk about it.

Second, they can respond to rape in an outrageous and highly controversial way, in which case everybody will talk about it but it will autocatalyze an opposition of people who hate feminists and obsessively try to prove that as many rape allegations as possible are false.

The other day I saw this on Twitter:

So as I understand it, Atticus Finch is now the bad guy in "To Kill A Mockingbird," because he doubted a story about rape.

— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) December 2, 2014

My first thought was that it was witty and hilarious. My second thought was “But when people are competing to see who can come up with the wittiest and most hilarious quip about why we should disbelieve rape victims, something has gone horribly wrong.” My third thought was the same as my second thought, but in ALL CAPS, because at that point I had read the replies at the bottom.

I have yet to see anyone holding a cardboard sign talking about how they are going to rape people just to make feminists mad, but it’s only a matter of time. Like PETA, their incentive gradient dooms them to shoot themselves in the foot again and again.

III.

Slate recently published an article about white people’s contrasting reactions to the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson versus the Eric Garner choking in NYC. And man, it is some contrast.

A Pew poll found that of white people who expressed an opinion about the Ferguson case, 73% sided with the officer. Of white people who expressed an opinion about the Eric Garner case, 63% sided with the black victim.

Media opinion follows much the same pattern. Arch-conservative Bill O’Reilly said he was “absolutely furious” about the way “the liberal media” and “race hustlers” had “twisted the story” about Ferguson in the service of “lynch mob justice” and “insulting the American police community, men and women risking their lives to protect us”. But when it came to Garner, O’Reilly said he was “extremely troubled” and that “there was a police overreaction that should have been adjudicated in a court of law.” His guest on FOX News, conservative commentator and fellow Ferguson-detractor Charles Krauthammer added that “From looking at the video, the grand jury’s decision [not to indict] is totally incomprehensible.” Saturday Night Live did a skit about Al Sharpton talking about the Garner case and getting increasingly upset because “For the first time in my life, everyone agrees with me.”

This follows about three months of most of America being at one another’s throats pretty much full-time about Ferguson. We got treated to a daily diet of articles like Ferguson Protester On White People: “Y’all The Devil” or Black People Had The Power To Fix The Problems In Ferguson Before The Brown Shooting – They Failed or Most White People In America Are Completely Oblivious and a whole bunch of people sending angry racist editorials and counter-editorials to each other for months. The damage done to race relations is difficult to overestimate – CBS reports that they dropped ten percentage points to the lowest point in twenty years, with over half of blacks now describing race relations as “bad”.

And people say it was all worth it, because it raised awareness of police brutality against black people, and if that rustles some people’s jimmies, well, all the worse for them.

But the Eric Garner case also would have raised awareness of police brutality against black people, and everybody would have agreed about it. It has become increasingly clear that, given sufficiently indisputable evidence of police being brutal to a black person, pretty much everyone in the world condemns it equally strongly.

And it’s not just that the Eric Garner case came around too late so we had to make do with the Mike Brown case. Garner was choked a month before Brown was shot, but the story was ignored, then dug back up later as a tie-in to the ballooning Ferguson narrative.

More important, unarmed black people are killed by police or other security officers about twice a week according to official statistics, and probably much more often than that. You’re saying none of these shootings, hundreds each year, made as good a flagship case as Michael Brown? In all this gigantic pile of bodies, you couldn’t find one of them who hadn’t just robbed a convenience store? Not a single one who didn’t have ten eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence all saying he started it?

I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.

The Ferguson protesters say they have a concrete policy proposal – they want cameras on police officers. There’s only spotty polling on public views of police body cameras before the Ferguson story took off, but what there is seems pretty unaninimous. A UK poll showed that 90% of the population of that country wanted police to have body cameras in February. US polls are more of the form “crappy poll widget on a news site” (1, 2, 3) but they all hovered around 80% approval for the past few years. I also found a poll by Police Magazine in which a plurality of the police officers they surveyed wanted to wear body cameras, probably because of evidence that they cut down on false accusations. Even before Ferguson happened, you would have a really hard time finding anybody in or out of uniform who thought police cameras were a bad idea.

And now, after all is said and done, ninety percent of people are still in favor – given methodology issues, the extra ten percent may or may not represent a real increase. The difference between whites and blacks is a rounding error. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is barely worth talking about- 79% of Republicans are still in support. The people who think Officer Darren Wilson is completely innocent and the grand jury was right to release him, the people muttering under their breath about race hustlers and looters – eighty percent of those people still want cameras on their cops.

If the Ferguson protests didn’t do much to the public’s views on police body cameras, they sure changed its views on some other things. I wrote before about how preliminary polls say that hearing about Ferguson increased white people’s confidence in the way the police treat race. Now the less preliminary polls are out, and they show the effect was larger than even I expected.

[source]

White people’s confidence in the police being racially unbiased increased from 35% before the story took off to 52% today. Could even a deliberate PR campaign by the nation’s police forces have done better? I doubt it.

It’s possible that this is an artifact of the question’s wording – after all, it asks people about their local department, and maybe after seeing what happened in Ferguson, people’s local police forces look pretty good by comparison. But then why do black people show the opposite trend?

I think this is exactly what it looks like. Just as PETA’s outrageous controversial campaign to spread veganism make people want to eat more animals in order to spite them, so the controversial nature of this particular campaign against police brutality and racism made white people like their local police department even more to spite the people talking about how all whites were racist.

Once again, the tradeoff.

If campaigners against police brutality and racism were extremely responsible, and stuck to perfectly settled cases like Eric Garner, everybody would agree with them but nobody would talk about it.

If instead they bring up a very controversial case like Michael Brown, everybody will talk about it, but they will catalyze their own opposition and make people start supporting the police more just to spite them. More foot-shooting.

IV.

Here is a graph of some of the tags I commonly use for my posts, with the average number of hits per post in each tag. It’s old, but I don’t want to go through the trouble of making a new one, and the trends have stayed the same since then.

I blog about charity only rarely, but it must be the most important thing I can write about here. Convincing even a few more people to donate to charity, or to redirect their existing donations to a more effective program, can literally save dozens or even hundreds of lives even with the limited reach that a private blog has. It probably does more good for the world than all of the other categories on here combined. But it’s completely uncontroversial – everyone agrees it’s a good thing – and it is the least viewed type of post.

Compare this to the three most viewed category of post. Politics is self-explanatory. Race and gender are a type of politics even more controversial and outrage-inducing than regular politics. And that “regret” all the way on the right is my “things i will regret writing” tag, for posts that I know are going to start huge fights and probably get me in lots of trouble. They’re usually race and gender as well, but digging deep into the really really controversial race and gender related issues.

The less useful, and more controversial, a post here is, the more likely it is to get me lots of page views.

For people who agree with me, my angry rants on identity politics are a form of ego defense, saying “You’re okay, your in-group was in the right the whole time.” Linking to it both raises their status as an in-group members, and acts as a potential assault on out-group members who are now faced with strong arguments telling them they’re wrong.

As for the people who disagree with me, they’ll sometimes write angry rebuttals on their own blogs, and those rebuttals will link to my own post as often as not. Or they’ll talk about it with their disagreeing friends, and their friends will get mad and want to tell me I’m wrong, and come over here to read the post to get more ammunition for their counterarguments. I have a feature that allows me to see who links to all of my posts, so I can see this all happening in real-time.

I don’t make enough money off the ads on this blog to matter very much. But if I did, and this was my only means of subsistence, which do you think I’d write more of? Posts about charity which only get me 2,000 paying customers? Or posts that turn all of you against one another like a pack of rabid dogs, and get me 16,000?

I don’t have a fancy bar graph for them, but I bet this same hierarchy of interestingness applies to the great information currents and media outlets that shape society as a whole.

It’s in activists’ interests to destroy their own causes by focusing on the most controversial cases and principles, the ones that muddy the waters and make people oppose them out of spite. And it’s in the media’s interest to help them and egg them on.

V.

And now, for something completely different.

Before “meme” meant doge and all your base, it was a semi-serious attempt to ground cultural evolution in parasitology. The idea was to replace a model of humans choosing whichever ideas they liked with a model of ideas as parasites that evolved in ways that favored their own transmission. This never really caught on, because most people’s response was “That’s neat. So what?”

But let’s talk about toxoplasma.

Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.

It’s the ciiiiiircle of life!

What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?

Consider the war on terror. It’s a truism that each time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Taken as a meme, it is a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and several bajillion of their tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.

From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

Replicators are also going to evolve. Some Afghan who thinks up a particularly effective terrorist strategy helps the meme spread to more Americans as the resulting outrage fuels the War on Terror. When the American bombing heats up, all of the Afghan villagers radicalized in by the attack will remember the really effective new tactic that Khalid thought up and do that one instead of the boring old tactic that barely killed any Americans at all. Some American TV commentator who comes up with a particularly stirring call to retaliation will find her words adopted into party platforms and repeated by pro-war newspapers. While pacifists on both sides work to defuse the tension, the meme is engaging in a counter-effort to become as virulent as possible, until people start suggesting putting pork fat in American bombs just to make Muslims even madder.

So let’s talk about Tumblr.

Tumblr’s interface doesn’t allow you to comment on other people’s posts, per se. Instead, it lets you reblog them with your own commentary added. So if you want to tell someone they’re an idiot, your only option is to reblog their entire post to all your friends with the message “you are an idiot” below it.

Whoever invented this system either didn’t understand memetics, or understood memetics much too well.

What happens is – someone makes a statement which is controversial by Tumblr standards, like “Protect Doctor Who fans from kitten pic sharers at all costs.” A kitten pic sharer sees the statement, sees red, and reblogs it to her followers with a series of invectives against Doctor Who fans. Since kitten pic sharers cluster together in the social network, soon every kitten pic sharer has seen the insult against kitten pic sharer – as they all feel the need to add their defensive commentary to it, soon all of them are seeing it from ten different directions. The angry invectives get back to the Doctor Who fans, and now they feel deeply offended, so they reblog it among themselves with even more condemnations of the kitten pic sharers, who now not only did whatever inspired the enmity in the first place, but have inspired extra hostility because their hateful invectives are right there on the post for everyone to see. So about half the stuff on your dashboard is something you actually want to see, and the other half is towers of alternate insults that look like this:

Actually, pretty much this happened to the PETA story I started off with

And then you sigh and scroll down to the next one. Unless of course you are a Doctor Who fan, in which case you sigh and then immediately reblog with the comment “It’s obvious you guys started ganging up against us first, don’t try to accuse **US** now” because you can’t just let that accusation stand.

I make fun of Tumblr social justice sometimes, but the problem isn’t with Tumblr social justice, it’s structural. Every community on Tumblr somehow gets enmeshed with the people most devoted to making that community miserable. The tiny Tumblr rationalist community somehow attracts, concentrates, and constantly reblogs stuff from the even tinier Tumblr community of people who hate rationalists and want them to be miserable (no, well-intentioned and intelligent critics, I am not talking about you). It’s like one of those rainforest ecosystems where every variety of rare endangered nocturnal spider hosts a parasite who has evolved for millions of years solely to parasitize that one spider species, and the parasites host parasites who have evolved for millions of years solely to parasitize them. If Tumblr social justice is worse than anything else, it’s mostly because everyone has a race and a gender so it’s easier to fire broad cannonades and just hit everybody.

Tumblr’s reblog policy makes it a hothouse for toxoplasma-style memes that spread via outrage. Following the ancient imperative of evolution, if memes spread by outrage they adapt to become as outrage-inducing as possible.

Or rather, that is just one of their many adaptations. I realize this toxoplasma metaphor sort of strains credibility, so I want to anchor this idea of outrage-memes in pretty much the only piece of memetics everyone can agree upon.

The textbook example of a meme – indeed, almost the only example ever discussed – is the chain letter. “Send this letter to ten people and you will prosper. Fail to pass it on, and you will die tomorrow.” And so the letter replicates.

It might be useful evidence that we were on the right track here, with our toxoplasma memes and everything, if we could find evidence that they reproduced in the same way.

If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have missed the “everyone who does not reblog the issue du jour is trash” wars. For a few weeks around the height of the Ferguson discussion, people constantly called out one another for not reblogging enough Ferguson-related material, or (Heavens forbid) saying they were sick of the amount of Ferguson material they were seeing. It got so bad that various art blogs that just posted pretty paintings, or kitten picture blogs that just reblogged pictures of kittens were feeling the heat (you thought I was joking about the hate for kitten picture bloggers. I never joke.) Now the issue du jour seems to be Pakistan. Just to give a few examples:

“friends if you are reblogging things that are not about ferguson right now please queue them instead. please pay attention to things that are more important. it’s not the time to talk about fandoms or jokes it’s time to talk about injustices.” [source]

“can yall maybe take some time away from reblogging fandom or humor crap and read up and reblog pakistan because the privilege you have of a safe bubble is not one shared by others” [source]

“If you’re uneducated, do not use that as an excuse. Do not say, “I’m not picking sides because I don’t know the full story,” because not picking a side is supporting Wilson. And by supporting him, you are on a racist side…Ignoring this situation will put you in deep shit, and it makes you racist. If you’re not racist, do not just say “but I’m not racist!!” just get educated and reblog anything you can.” [source]

“why are you so disappointing? I used to really like you. you’ve kept totally silent about peshawar, not acknowledging anything but fucking zutara or bellarke or whatever. there are other posts you’ve reblogged too that I wouldn’t expect you to- but those are another topic. I get that you’re 19 but maybe consider becoming a better fucking person?” [source]

“if you’re white, before you reblog one of those posts that’s like “just because i’m not blogging about ferguson doesn’t mean i don’t care!!!” take a few seconds to: consider the privilege you have that allows you not to pay attention if you don’t want to. consider those who do not have the privilege to focus on other things. ask yourself why you think it’s more important that people know you “care” than it is to spread information and show support. then consider that you are a fucking shitbaby.” [source]

“For everyone reblogging Ferguson, Ayotzinapa, North Korea etc and not reblogging Peshawar, you should seriously be ashamed of yourselves.” [source]

“This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going outside their homes to be shot and u cant post a fucking picture because it makes u a little upset?? I could give two fucks about internet shitlings.” [source]

You may also want to check the Tumblr tag “the trash is taking itself out”, in which hundreds of people make the same joke (“I think some people have stopped reading my blog because I’m talking too much about [the issue du jour]. I guess the trash is taking itself out now.”)

This is pretty impressive. It’s the first time outside of a chain letter that I have seen our memetic overlords throw off all pretense and just go around shouting “SPREAD ME OR YOU ARE GARBAGE AND EVERYONE WILL HATE YOU.”

But it only works because it’s tapped into the most delicious food source an ecology of epistemic parasites could possibly want – controversy,

I would like to be able to write about charity more often. Feminists would probably like to start supercharging the true rape accusations for a change. Protesters against police brutality would probably like to be able to focus on clear-cut cases that won’t make white people support the police even harder. Even PETA would probably prefer being the good guys for once. But the odds aren’t good. Not because the people involved are bad people who want to fail. Not even because the media-viewing public are stupid. Just because information ecologies are not your friend.

This blog tries to remember the Litany of Jai: “Almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken”. We pretty much never wrestle with flesh and blood; it’s powers and principalities all the way down.

VI.

…but one of them tends to come up suspiciously often.

A while ago I wrote a post called Meditations on Moloch where I pointed out that in any complex multi-person system, the system acts according to its own chaotic incentives that don’t necessarily correspond to what any individual within the system wants. The classic example is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which usually ends at defect-defect even though both of the two prisoners involved prefer cooperate-cooperate. I compare this malignant discoordination to Ginsberg’s portrayal of Moloch, the demon-spirit of capitalism gone wrong.

I would support instating a National Conversation Topic Czar if that allowed us to get rid of celebrities.

— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) August 26, 2010

Steven in his wisdom reminds us that there is no National Conversation Topic Czar. The rise of some topics to national prominence and the relegation of others to tiny print on the eighth page of the newspapers occurs by an emergent uncoordinated process. When we say “the media decided to cover Ferguson instead of Eric Garner”, we reify and anthropomorphize an entity incapable of making goal-directed decisions.

A while back there was a minor scandal over JournoList, a private group where left-leaning journalists met and exchanged ideas. I think the conservative spin was “the secret conspiracy running the liberal media – revealed!” I wish they had been right. If there were a secret conspiracy running the liberal media, they could all decide they wanted to raise awareness of racist police brutality, pick the most clear-cut and sympathetic case, and make it non-stop news headlines for the next two months. Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.

But as it is, even if many journalists are interested in raising awareness of police brutality, given their total lack of coordination there’s not much they can do. An editor can publish a story on Eric Garner, but in the absence of a divisive hook, the only reason people will care about it is that caring about it is the right thing and helps people. But that’s “charity”, and we already know from my blog tags that charity doesn’t sell. A few people mumble something something deeply distressed, but neither black people nor white people get interested, in the “keep tuning to their local news channel to get the latest developments on the case” sense.

The idea of liberal strategists sitting down and choosing “a flagship case for the campaign against police brutality” is poppycock. Moloch – the abstracted spirit of discoordination and flailing response to incentives – will publicize whatever he feels like publicizing. And if they want viewers and ad money, the media will go along with him.

Which means that it’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship case for fighting police brutality and racism is the flagship case that we in fact got. It’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship cases for believing rape victims are the ones that end up going viral. It’s not a coincidence that the only time we ever hear about factory farming is when somebody’s doing something that makes us almost sympathetic to it. It’s not coincidence, it’s not even happenstance, it’s enemy action. Under Moloch, activists are irresistably incentivized to dig their own graves. And the media is irresistably incentivized to help them.

Lost is the ability to agree on simple things like fighting factory farming or rape. Lost is the ability to even talk about the things we all want. Ending corporate welfare. Ungerrymandering political districts. Defrocking pedophile priests. Stopping prison rape. Punishing government corruption and waste. Feeding starving children. Simplifying the tax code.

But also lost is our ability to treat each other with solidarity and respect.

Under Moloch, everyone is irresistably incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive. Race relations are at historic lows not because white people and black people disagree on very much, but because the media absolutely worked its tuchus off to find the single issue that white people and black people disagreed over the most and ensure that it was the only issue anybody would talk about. Men’s rights activists and feminists hate each other not because there’s a huge divide in how people of different genders think, but because only the most extreme examples of either side will ever gain traction, and those only when they are framed as attacks on the other side.

People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimized to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust.

Imagine Moloch, in his Carthaginian-demon personification, looking out over the expanse of the world, eagle-eyed for anything that can turn brother against brother and husband against wife. Finally he decides “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING. LET ME FIND SOME STORY THAT WILL MAKE PEOPLE HATE EACH OTHER OVER BIRD-WATCHING”. And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.

(You think I’m exaggerating? Listen: “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? VIDEO GAMES.”)

Some people think that just because two people have the same condition or disability that they will be friends, guaranteed. This is not the case, however those with the same condition as themselves will indeed often be more empathetic and understanding of their day to day challenges.

Because of the nature of the curly hair project and my career, I end up socialising with others on the spectrum a lot. Although most of what I do feels deeply rewarding and fulfilling, there are times where I feel completely disconnected from everyone. These times all have one trigger, and that is when I write or talk about something and people with ASD disagree or can’t relate to it. I completely understand that no two people (ASD, NT or otherwise) are the same. I understand that everyone has their own opinions and perceptions of the world. I understand that I cannot realistically expect for everyone to agree with everything I say. But I once (naively) hoped that there would a lot more similarities and connections between myself and others with ASD than there would be between myself and neurotypicals.

What I have found is that no two people on the spectrum are alike. Although we do all share the triad of impairments and we do all tend to steer towards the same sorts of traits, the severity and the combination of the traits, as well as the way they manifest, can be totally unique to each person. Unfortunately, this can lead to me being very unhappy because I end up feeling extremely alien, extremely disconnected, and extremely lonely.

“I feel like a kid who read “Adventure Time” is not just going to put down “Adventure Time” and call it a day… you don’t want to create a kids comics culture that’s just predicated on them buying “Adventure Time” because they love “Adventure Time” and then being done with comics. You want to create a situation where you have turned these kids onto this art form and now they’re checking out everything–or they’re making their own comics.”

- From this interview with Shannon Watters, my editor on Adventure Time.  I agree with this SO MUCH, and a lot of what we did on the book was trying to show people who maybe haven’t read comics before the weird, amazing, crazy things that can be done in this weird, amazing, crazy medium.  I hope we succeeded!

Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches — “Christians More Supportive of Torture Than Non-Religious Americans” — reports on the recent polling data demonstrating the perverse vapidity of “pro-life” white evangelical moralism:

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that Americans, by a 59-31 percent margin, believe that CIA “treatment of suspected terrorists” in detention was justified.

A plurality deemed that “treatment” to be “torture,” by a 49-38 percent margin.

Remarkably, the gap between torture supporters and opponents widens between voters who are Christian and those who are not religious. Just 39 percent of white evangelicals believe the CIA’s treatment of detainees amounted to torture, with 53 percent of white non-evangelical Protestants and 45 percent of white Catholics agreeing with that statement. Among the non-religious, though, 72 percent said the treatment amounted to torture. (The poll did not break down non-Christian religions in the results.)

Sixty nine percent of white evangelicals believe the CIA treatment was justified, compared to just 20 percent who said it was not. (Those numbers, incidentally, roughly mirror the breakdown of Republican versus Democratic voters among white evangelicals.)

What is the one common trait uniting all of that 69 percent of white evangelicals applauding CIA torture? They’re “pro-life,” of course.

That means they have the moral high ground. It’s what makes them morally superior to everyone else.

Just ask them, they’ll tell you.

 

That 26-percent minority of white evangelicals who say torture is never/rarely justified? Those are the folks the other 74 percent like to refer to as “post-evangelicals.”

Here’s Brian Zahnd:

I don’t know of a greater indictment against American evangelicalism than the fact that a majority of its adherents actually admit they support the use of illegal torture on suspected terrorists. …

Evangelical support of torture is what we might call an “eruption of the real.” It’s a horrifying moment of unintended truth-telling where we discover that allegiance to national self-interest trumps allegiance to Jesus Christ. Now with the release of the Senate’s report of the C.I.A.’s use of torture I’m calling on American evangelicals to stop playing games and decide if they are going to be Christian or not. …

Apparently Christianity has become so incomprehensible in the security state of America that millions of evangelicals think they can be Christian and support torture. But they cannot.

These evangelicals have reached a crisis of decision. They can choose security. They can choose to endorse torture in the name of security. But to do so is to renounce the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Obviously, Zahnd is just an unwitting apologist for the Satanic baby-killers.

 

 

by Will Wilkinson

So it looks like Jeb Bush is running for president. The prospect of a Bush vs. Clinton race in 2014 does not warm the cockles of any of my internal organs, but I want to put in a speculative word for presidential dynasties, despite the repugnance of that idea to my small-“r” republican ideals.

The president is the head of the executive branch of government. You took social studies, right? But, really, what does that mean? It means that the president is nominally in charge of the entire, vast bureaucracy of the American state, including the military and the various spy shops. I think it helps to try to maintain a distinction between the government and the state. Let’s say the government is made up of a constantly churning set of elected officials – the president and congress. (Not sure whether to put the courts in here or not, but no matter; this is just a rough-and-ready division.) The state is the more-or-less permanent administrative apparatus – all the many thousands of clock-punchers at the EPA and the FBI and Homeland Security and Commerce and Labor and State and the Pentagon and the NSA, etc. It’s what the chief executive is executive of, how he (or she!) executes, the way the government governs. It’s also way more than the executive can possibly keep tabs on.

Each president has a handful of political appointees in each agency, but either they come from outside and don’t really understand how things work, in which case they’ll more than likely be manipulated by the senior agency hacks, or they come from inside, in which case their loyalty is more likely to align with the agency’s internal powers-that-be than with the president. The chief executive has a thousand strings he can pull, but a lot of them aren’t actually connected to the various agencies’ real mechanisms of influence and power.

What we have here is a classic principal/agent problem. If you want the president to have effective power to govern via the bureaucracy, you’ll want him to be able to overcome some of the problem of bringing the agencies to heel. A big part of the problem is that agents almost necessarily have information their principals need but don’t have, and can use these asymmetries in information – can dole it out or withhold it or misrepresent it – to manipulate the principal into wanting what the agents wanted all along. Just think about how brazenly the CIA lies to congressional oversight committees. There’s no reason to think they don’t do it to presidents, too.

The most effective presidents, in terms of overcoming agency problems, will be those with strong preexisting networks within the bureaucracies willing to circumvent the de facto power structure and independently transmit reliable information straight to the White House. One reason I thought in 2008, and still think today, that Hillary Clinton would have been a more effective chief executive than Barack Obama is that a senator and insider wife of a two-term president is much more likely to have useful allies and contacts within the bureaucracy than a green, freshman senator new to town. And what’s even better than that? The son of a former CIA director, vice-president and president, who is also the brother of a two-term president. If Jeb Bush is worried that somebody in the CIA or State Department is dicking him around, there’s a good chance he knows a guy who knows a guy who is owed a big favor and can get him the straight scoop. And that’s power – the power by which the government renders the far-flung and opaque permanent state governable.

It may well be that the insider power of dynastic presidents amounts to a form of corruption, as our populist, republican instincts suggest. But it may also be that, given the vast scope of the modern state, presidents without this sort of power can’t really be said to be in charge. And the enormous, deadly, often malign power of the sprawling American security state makes it worth asking whether a decent president who isn’t really in charge is better than an odious one who is.

(Photo: Former US president George Bush, his wife Barbara Bush, their son Jeb Bush, First Lady Hillary Clinton, and US President Bill Clinton look up to see the US Army Golden Knights parachute team at the conclusion of the dedication ceremony of the George Bush Library in College Station, TX on November 6, 1997. By Joyce Naltchayan/AFP/Getty Images)